You are going away. We walk from the funny little room you rent out into the street where it is raining, and you pull your coat over mine to keep me dry. There is silence everywhere, except for the sound of rain falling on the stone walkway and sometimes sideways onto our cheeks, misting us over like the time we were in Niagara Falls taking pictures of each other beneath the spray. One day you will be famous, but we don't know this now. You are the star, I am the one you love, even when your friends don't think I'm good enough for you. In many ways I am better than you are, kinder, softer, more compassionate and open-minded, but these things are not important to them. You care and you don't care. Sometimes when you look at me it is not only with love, but maybe with a little bit of sadness too, sprinkled with a zest of guilt.
My friends and my family don't think that you are good enough for me. They say you are strange. They don't understand your poetry or your stories, your passion about running, the way you dress or the way you look. Your long hair frightens them. My father says he thinks you're gay. My mother tells me you are too intense. I think you terrify them with your beauty and your genius, and although they offer up words of support, I know they are happy you are leaving. Hoping I will now forget about you and marry a proper dentist or a doctor or at least someone who is serious about something more than running marathons and painting with words.
So far away, so far from me. I want to tell you I understand, but I don't. I want to tell you I want to be there with you, but I can't. I want you to ask me to be there with you, to leave everything behind, and you don't. But if you asked, I would. You tell me the altitude there will be exactly what it is when you run the most important race of your life. I don't care. I want you to say it doesn't matter, that you will stay here, that there is nothing more important than me - than us.
Your coach is someone I don't like who doesn't like me. He has that very strange name and there is something sneaky and perverse about him that I pick up. I think he feels that he has won. That he is the victor and I am the loser. He is going with you, not me, and in the taxi I can feel him smirking at me, even when he's talking to you. Only you.
At the airport I hold you close and kiss your eyes, your hair, your nose, your neck, and then your lips. I close my eyes and watch you kissing me and know that if I asked you to right now you might stay. But I don't, even as my own silence breaks my heart.
When your letters start to come, they are full of love and plans and stories and dreams. You have read Hemingway and send me the book, A Movable Feast. You tell me that will will live like that in France one day, that you will be my Hemingway. I will be your Zelda. You have already drawn pictures of me split down the middle, broken into black and white. I don't know what you see there, you never tell me you think I'm crazy, but perhaps you do and don't care. I think you need my craziness to write your stories. Your own life so milky white and soft doesn't offer up enough to twist the words into something that will make people wince. But mine does and I know you love to hear me talk, tell you how it's been, what went wrong and how I felt. When I read these things on paper I don't feel happy, but almost annoyed, although I don't tell you that. You are the star. I am the muse.
Missing you the way I do, far from everyone I know in a strange town in a new job, I begin to do crazy things. Maybe I am trying to get your attention. One night I pick up a stranger in a bar and go for a ride with him, far out into the hills, where there is nothing but silence and back roads. He tells me to throw my purse and my sweater into a ditch and then he drives away from that place to another where he demands that I do things to him that I haven't even done for you. All I can think about is what a story this will be when you finally write it, if I live to tell you about it. But although I get through this latest thing, this thing that I do out of love for you - only you - you will never write it down.
I call you in your room in some town in Germany and through the static try to explain to the clerk that I need to talk to you. The line is buzzing like bees and I wait and wait and wait. Then the line goes dead and I fall asleep with the phone in my hand.
When I finally reach you days later, you do not answer. It is a woman's voice I hear. A woman who is laughing - laughing with a German accent. Is that possible? When she puts you on the phone you are no longer you. You are the man you will be when I see you years later on television or reading your work somewhere. You are harder, edgier, and you don't look kind anymore. Maybe you never were. You are puffed up like a blowfish with your talent and your success. But you are not happy. And neither am I.
When your first book comes out I read through the stories like someone munching through a box of chocolates, gorging myself on the love that we had that now lives on a page. I am everywhere, but not with you.
Life moves along in all the usual ways and I find someone else. I marry and have children but I still dream about you. When your second book comes out, I flip through it in a bookstore and then leave it there. I see that you have found another muse. When the third one wins every award there is to win I don't even bother to track down a copy. Even as old friends ask, "Isn't that .... 's book?" and I tell them that it is, I just don't want to read it. When I see an article in the paper on you that in between the lines tells me your wife has left you and that you only see your children on rare occasions, I want to call you up and say, "See what you've done?"
I used to keep everything I could find that talked about you - where you were and what you were doing, what you had written and what you had won - newspaper and magazine pieces, ticket stubs from readings, printouts from the internet. I'd look at fuzzy photographs of you, cut them out and hold them up to my face, rubbing softly like a hand on a genie's lamp, hoping they would turn into you, feel like you, smell like you. I'd study your face, looking for "us," and then gently kiss your paper lips before stuffing them into a drawer. But not anymore. This time I ball the pages up and throw them into the fireplace, watching them turn to ash along with the rest of yesterday's news. I think it's finally over.
But sometimes you appear in dreams. Amber eyes locked into mine in the rain. The two of us huddled together under your coat. Dreaming of a life that will never be.
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