Chapter Text
The light is going.
I hadn't noticed.
One moment the field was red and the next it wasn't.
The poppies are only shapes now.
The village lights have come on below.
There are more houses than I remember.
A few stand where ours used to be.
I try to work out exactly where the kitchen was.
The bedroom.
The back door.
I can't.
The years have blurred the edges.
I used to think I'd never forget any of it.
The tree creaks overhead.
For a second, I almost turn to tell you.
The way I always used to.
Then I remember.
Not that you're dead.
I've remembered that for a long time.
I remember that you're not mine anymore.
Not mine to carry around.
Not mine to drag through every year after.
Not mine to keep rebuilding from memory whenever the real thing starts fading.
I look at my hands.
They're old.
I don't feel old.
Not really.
Most days I still expect to catch my reflection and see a girl.
Instead I find somebody older than my mother ever got to be.
Older than you ever got to be.
I've spent so much time trying to imagine what you would've looked like.
The lines around your eyes.
Grey hair.
The way your voice might've changed.
I can never quite do it.
Every version feels wrong.
You always stop at seventeen.
The sun has almost disappeared now.
I think about all the years between then and now.
The jobs.
The cities.
The apartments.
The people who tried to love me.
The people I tried to love back.
How every road somehow curved back here.
Back to this hill.
Back to this tree.
As though there was something waiting for me.
Some answer.
Some version of you.
But there isn't.
There's only a field.
A tree.
A village full of strangers.
And that's all right.
I sit there for a while.
Long enough for the last light to leave.
Long enough that I can barely make out the path home.
I realize I don't feel disappointed.
I thought I would.
I thought coming back would hurt.
Instead it feels a little like arriving somewhere after a very long journey and finding nobody at the station.
You wait.
You look around.
Then eventually you pick up your bag.
You understand.
You were never meant to stay.
The wind moves through the branches.
The same sound.
Or maybe not.
Maybe I've forgotten that too.
I lean back against the trunk.
Close my eyes.
And that's when it happens.
Nothing.
No memory.
No vision.
No final sign.
No feeling of you beside me.
Just the evening.
Just the wind.
Just the ache settling quietly into its place.
For years I thought letting go would feel different.
Louder.
More important.
Instead it feels a lot like being tired.
The kind of tired that comes at the end of a long day.
When there's nothing left to do.
Nothing left to say.
The village lights blur below.
I watch them for a while.
Then I stop watching.
The tree creaks overhead.
Somewhere a dog barks.
A door closes.
And without really meaning to, I rest my head against the bark and breathe out.
It leaves me slowly.
As though I've been holding it since seventeen.