I think so often now about all the places we saw together. I can’t imagine New York without you in it, the velvet darkness as it fell over the city and how the buildings came alive under its spell. I remember the tilt of light in late Boston afternoons, half-full glasses of whiskey that looked like they drank up the sun and that lonely smell of the sea. Then Oregon, always Oregon, how the mountains dropped abruptly into the wild air and how we were all so breathless with the thrill, looking endlessly down. I remember sitting on the pull-out bed in our hotel room and writing about I thought these days of adventure might be the happiest times of my life. I’ve been wrong about so much, but I wasn’t wrong about that.
It’s too late now and I know this. But sometimes I still dream I’m in the mountains -- and you’re there, you as how I remember you, with your black hair and bright eyes, the wonderful surprise of your laugh. You’re never any older in my dreams; and then I realize with a sinking heart that you’ll never be any older when I wake up.
The world goes on even if the people within it don’t. I know they say you shouldn’t regret anything, that you’ll regret the things you haven’t done more than the ones that you have. But I also know that the people who say that haven’t made my mistakes.
It’s harder than it used to be to look both forward and back. I remember being very young, the glossy sheen of western sunshine on my legs and the earth underneath my back, the weight of the sky as I peered upward. In those days my skin was almost as dark as yours. I remember telling you that I’d heard someone say before that because this wasn’t heaven we didn’t have to be perfect. It was just earth. You told me that no one ever has to be perfect, because no one ever is.
I was never warned how a place can be marked so deeply by a life. When I go up north now, sit on the porch in the still evenings and look out on the water, I try to see it as clearly as you once did. I count the gray-white birds as they skim across the glass surface of the lake, and I try to memorize everything about it that you ever loved.