My job had been to place her pictures in cardboard boxes. I remember how deeply I breathed and how my composure gave out when she left the room. Also, there was the problem of my voice becoming high-pitched by its sentimentality. She must've sensed this weakness but kept her mouth shut. I centered myself by carefully studying the photographs she’d given me before putting them inside the boxes. Most captured M. and friends in smiles, drinks raised, arms twined around each other---the insistence of youth.
Someone once said to me "you're a hard person to get to know". M. liked that. She never asked questions about me, didn't seem to care. She was only happy to have me there. On her nightstand framed a picture of B., her boyfriend, kissing a bunny. She told me the story of B. long before, answering any question I could invent. He was French, a jazz pianist; his parents after a dinner party told B. privately that M. seemed naive. This hurt M.
I watched M. from behind, her back turned to me. She paid special attention to her appearance. She excused herself one time for going out in public without make-up. I paid her no heed. The walls of her room were midnight blue, she'd chosen the color, and I helped paint. It still smelled incredibly fresh, plastic even. Deep down, I think M. wanted the room to be more autographic. Her room before, on the other side of the house, had been bare, generic, impromptu. But now she was leaving the house altogether. There were some homemade wall hangings, one was of wood and etched into its side- M. loves B.K.K. I knew that it was indeed B., but I'd never heard M. speak his surname. Worse still, M. had often spoken of other men. L. for instance.
Some photos were less straightforward in their psychology. I had to ask M. about them. She explained. Maybe explained as a mother explains to a tedious child. If that was the case, then I tried to learn as an innocent. Part of me thought that purity could wrestle her to the ground. I only raised my voice once to M. and that was just before I never saw her again.
She may have asked me to eat with her. We ate on the carpet in the adjoining room---I lay on my stomach; she sat upright spread-eagle. I pointed to her sex in humor. She closed her legs not without bitterness. We ate silently cold cereal. I think she was lonely. M. spoke of her plans for a scrapbook in memory of her friend, J. She showed me the newly bought album with sweet anticipation in her eyes. I shared that with her. I'm almost certain I said, "You have so many pictures of people in your life, I have none", which was a mistake because either a silence or warning followed. It is also possible she boasted having a picture of me tucked away somewhere, but I'm not entirely certain. Nor do I quite remember her taking a picture of me. In the past, I've known people who've owned photographs of me without my knowledge. Only much later did I find out. I put that phenomenon past M., though.
M. offered to give me a tour of the photo lab she used to develop her pictures. When we arrived, the lab had closed early so we sat in her car and talked. This kind of education prompted me to say to her, while rinsing our cereal bowls, "Describe to me your periods". M. didn't appreciate it. She said, "You have a sister". I didn't know M. knew that much about me, so I withdrew the question. Rather, I didn't know M. would use such knowledge against me. It was how she had mutated those particulars about my past that bothered me so. I feared she might know too much. From then on, I took greater precautions to stay out of her way.
We sat on the porch steps and waited for her clothes to finish drying. It seemed to me that we couldn't look at each other for a long time. She even said, "I'm having trouble looking people in the eyes". I knew that it was an apology. Somehow I fought against it, staring into her eyes for hours. There was a quiet theatre that happened between our eyes. Lying in her bed at night, that theatre resolved itself in entrances and exits. I had no idea how M. presented me to other people. I knew she had her reasons for the secrecy she maintained. I never doubted for a minute the fantastic possibility that I would someday disappear. Distinctly, I recall, the second time I met her, walking away with tears in my eyes because of the overwhelming absence she created in me.
The time it took to pack up her belongings seemed an eternity and I quit halfway telling her I had to go. I did have to go. She said, "Feel better now?" I nodded my head but I know my face told otherwise. M. knew because she smiled and hugged me.
M. once said, after flipping through a magazine "I'm losing my body". There affected a strange quiet in the room, now that I could hear everything and chose not to. I sensed she wanted an answer, but only as sensing something from a vast distance. I stopped from speaking, afraid that denial of her statement would reinforce her feelings of destruction. My fear pinned me in a solemn void where all manner of answering would have come from a place of inextricable pain and adversity. I chose silence thinking that all unkindness would be satisfied. I suspected, and still do suspect M. wanted me to affirm her destruction. It's entirely possible M. said "I'm being destroyed." Immediately, I felt insinuated in her destruction. I remember my eye became fixed on a single, solitary point---an axis from which my whole being began to pivot. In fact, it's entirely possible she said outright "You are destroying me." If either was the case, then surely my silence gave way to her destruction. Although the thought didn't occur to me until much later, I can say this now with almost complete conviction.
The agony of our togetherness experienced as a single point happened one other time. It was before the day of her move. I was sitting on the arm of the couch in her den. She was some few feet away from me, near the other end of the couch. Our bodies were both turned in the same direction in complete dissociation. Perhaps our faces ran across each other every now and then. And I believe too her hands were folded in her lap. It seems almost unfathomable now but I controlled the floor. I had been given it through a direct and polite means. And I struggled to maintain it with a delicacy that eased itself even more onto her through my spare but pitying glance. It seems to me though that this glance was harshly received despite what attempts I made at lessening its intensity and treating it further and further out of accord with my words. I was trying desperately to pass off a system of language that wasn't bound in consequence. And at times, admittedly, it appeared I'd removed both of us to kinder and quieter climes. But then, unexpectedly, a loud violence surged in her eyes and caused her lips to part and from them I saw a strain of breath begin to trip forward. I braced onto something. I hastened to make good everything I'd said previously, patching up the gushing impossibility not with feeble words, but with the presentiment of those words trailing finally into a stunned and staggered fellowship. My eye fixed itself on an object. What I asked of M. in the next minute or so seems utterly impossible now---a fiction maybe, a figment of the imagination. And weeks later, I witnessed to my great satisfaction the budding of this request within her. And for some reason this didn't surprise me. She wore it like a badge, in fact. It seemed wholly intrinsic. But part of me wondered at its deceitful and artificial origin and I can say openly that I half-watched for its demise.
Somewhere, there are tapes of M.'s voice, possibly whole catalogs of emotion: crisp laughs, measures of dissent, warm entreaties and grief. But if these tapes were, they needed to pass through me first. This intimacy broadcast itself over miles of land. I drove this land stopping every few miles or so to pour water into my overheating car. I was driving towards the precise moment when M.'s voice would disappear over the radio. What kind of voice was it? I might describe it as ultra-feminine, tinged by a healthy breathiness, a resonance attributable to classes in radio broadcast and an affinity for the French language. I drove away from that voice in a narrow triumph that eclipsed the reality of my situation. It seems to me now that that hundred miles would have been near impossible had it not been for the disintegration of that voice.
Only yesterday I learned M. had a new name. It did not come as a surprise. It was a name I was entirely familiar with but never knew, really. I can't recall ever calling anyone this name. I remember seeing it in bold print. Or if I did pronounce it, I was always troubled by the way it sounded or was perceived. I'm fairly clear on its origins. I remember having the name in the presence of M. on more than one occasion. This bothers me. I wonder if I might have secretly introduced M. to this identity. Perhaps, I edged it to her across the expanse of a table. Or maybe it slipped from my mouth in conversation. I'm almost certain I dragged her to a film that rang of that name. Of course, there is always that fear. Also too, I doubt, at the time, she could have known its significance. Nor do I think she now realizes the awesome weight that name carries. At least to me. Or if she does it is in a completely different manner than my own. You see I don't like the name anymore whereas I'm almost positive she does. Or she has at least learned to like it. What is even more troubling is the uncertainty of what I should now call her, even though she has disappeared. If I were to speak this new name to people, I doubt they would know of whom I was speaking. I would have to use her old name---M. But M. would seem distant, maybe more distant than her new name. However, running into someone that knew her by this new name would make suspect my entire involvement with her. I think it might be better to never speak her name again.
* * * *
In the great stillness where I may not speak her name, her memory is laid down on paper. I wonder in what thoughtless moment she became concrete for me. When was it that her being would be emblazoned inside me forever? This complete penetration, it would be there time after, impossible to shake or abandon. As surely as it creates a cavernous void in my life, so too must my emptiness be imbued with its life force. Everything I've written here is true, or at least true, as I know truth. I do not know her whereabouts these days, although I have my suspicions. If ever she were to read what I've written here, I'm fairly positive she would doubt its existence. In fact, I'm certain. And what's more her reading these pages would change the necessary course of their truth. Everything would instantly dissolve and new meanings would emerge. This is my one hope.
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