The Leaving and the Left

When I left she cried.  It was gray day.  Slushy snow was on the ground and whirling clouds variously flocculate and drift, vaporously relaying their ambiguous messages overhead.  She weaved her rickety VW through dawdling traffic into town, across the overpass and to the bus station.

            "I've never been to this part of the city before," she said, and I looked at her.  Diamond earrings, jazzy red shirt and designer handbag.  Of course she hadn't.  We parked in a narrow space around back and waited a tense second before either of us said anything.

            "Guess I'll make sure its on time," I said.

            "I'll go with you," she offered, making sure to lock the door behind her twice. 

Everything seems simple until you think about it.

I wish I could take some virtuous delight in reporting on those who I've left. Sadly, they were all good people. Maybe they weren't. Can't remember any ruinous souls left strewn along the path. The blessing of memory is its selectivity. Dark spots are filled in like vacuous holes with the bright glow of warmer recollections. I remember leaving because reason won out on emotion. I remember leaving my heart behind. I remember being left.

When you stop moving you die.

Funny to think of exes. The very word, X, when spoken sounds like some strangely tallied scantron scorecard, the record sheet of how you've passed the relationship tests of life. "I'm still friends with all my exes," one reports solicitously. The ghosts of the past, our X's. X's crossed in bed. X's crossed via mass email status update. X's stretching back in a line of fading regret, from the familiar permanence of the present to the emptiness and echoes of the evanescent past.

I remember being left, when everything felt so right.  I remember a day in the park on grass tall and green and glossy and we lie on our sides and I stared up at the latticework of tree branches until they kissed the dark blue matt of penumbral sky where a storm was sounding its thunderous chords to signal impending dramatic entrance.  "I'll walk into the sky," I said dreamily and she sighed.  A gawky teenage boy polishing off the firmament of his imagination with a goddess at his wing.

            "I can't do this," she said, and miraculously everything within me suddenly shrank until I was terrifyingly small and the world was enormous.  Unfamiliar and abstract.  Blades of grass towering over a massive, jagged and alien landscape.  Ants were ferocious monsters in a dreadful convalescence of ferocious monsters.  I cried.  I remember I cried.  And everything around me seemed it had all along been in disguise, violently falling into unrecognizable pieces in a puzzle on the floor that itself reassembled into other figures, other puzzles.

The clouds move in aqueous silence as tiny flecks of snow start their slow descent over everything and I heft my bag from the trunk and board the bus. Springboard. I'll make it there by dark, I think, when she calls. On a phone, in her car, just outside the parked and revving bus in the parking lot.
            "I just wanted to say," she says, and starts to cry.
"It's okay," I console. Mercy. 

You never cried. Every time I left you, to think, and there were never tears. Maybe it was always assumed that I would be coming back. And even in exile, I always did.

All those commas that made up our otherwise levitant sentence, when for all others I wriggle away leaving only the skidsmear of a question mark. I wish I could take delight in so many questions, but to say I do would be a lie.

They who would believe anything, even lies they believe.

Another ex. Another mark on the page of time. Would you that I were now another one ledgered onto yours? Me who keeps moving. Me who keeps coming back. Traveling the world far and wide, sending postcards signed with an X to all those young friends now old and established into their fringes of the firmament. Me of the murkiest sexual compulsions, searching sad nights for a fix, the gas tank running low and the miles and miles of city ceaseless streaming passed, probing the unrecognizable lights for some grand statement, some grand conclusion, something wild and grand and free. You?