Creek Running North

The thought comes unbidden, but what thought doesn’t? If I had left sooner, things would be different.

I was not thinking about her, nor anything else in that year in fact, and yet the thought came, and the hair on my nape still stands.

For years just a sharp-folded note and the memory of phone calls, an unspoken gape in my chest. I spent a decade dissecting events, half-forgotten sighs and the crackling of static, and somehow forgot that she’d asked me to come right away.

Was it honor, or compassion that made me stay? Not likely, given my history. More likely fear of not having the argument, fear of being thought a coward for leaving a terminal note. Elissa would have cried, would have raged, and in a month have moved on, and would hate me still. We never talk, but she does not hate me. How much is that worth?

“You could come now.”
“That’s true, I could. I could buy a bus ticket.”
“They’re cheap! and I could see you tomorrow.”
“But what… should I just leave a note?”
“She won’t care, Chris. You know she won’t.”

I stayed to have the argument. And then for five years after that.

We might have walked together to the grocery store that night.

Perhaps nothing would have changed, except to trade a last phone call for a hurried embrace and the ability to mourn her aloud.

I might have taken the bicycle. A sobering thought, that, though far less painful amortized over the next eternal leaden months, and there is this as well, beneath it all:
she was a better person than me.

She was a better person than me.