I don’t know when I started coming here.
That’s not really true.
I know when.
I just don’t remember how it became
every week.
The same day.
The same hour.
The same spot.
I suppose the body finds its way
and I stopped asking.
The lake looks different today.
The water is a flat, pale grey,
like the colour of something
left out too long.
Small waves push toward the bank
and lose their shape before they arrive.
The trees lean into the water at the edge,
half in, half standing,
like they tried to leave once and stopped.
I watch them for a while.
Maybe it’s always been this way.
Maybe I only noticed today.
I don’t know.
—
The photograph is in my hand.
I don’t remember taking it out.
A picture of a painting.
A lake.
This lake.
Its edges are worn,
colours fading,
but the light is still there.
Blue pressing into green,
the white opening in the sky,
and the water so still
it doesn’t look like water.
It looks like the world
has been turned over
and placed beneath itself.
Sky below sky.
Trees beneath trees.
Clouds floating in both directions.
It doesn’t look like somewhere
a person found.
More like a promise
someone carried so long
they forgot who it was for.
I lean back and wait.
Because soon,
the light will change.
The air will go still.
Then the trees.
Then the water.
And for ten minutes,
just ten minutes in this entire week,
the world will finally look
the way it should.
Like the painting.
Like the photograph.
But it will pass
like a breath
that nobody caught.
—
She took this picture at a gallery once.
I remember that day.
Not the whole of it.
Just fragments.
The way she fixed my hair
when it was out of place.
The way she looked at me
when she thought I wasn’t looking.
The way she leaned against me
when she laughed.
Small things.
Nothing anyone else would notice.
We were just walking through.
Talking about something.
I’m not sure about what.
But I remember how she stopped mid-sentence.
Her eyes looking past me,
and something in her went quiet.
She rarely reacted that way.
I followed where she was looking.
A small canvas on the wall,
tucked between two pillars,
like it wasn’t asking to be noticed.
This painting.
This lake.
We just stood there.
Neither of us spoke.
I don’t think either of us
remembered to breathe.
Like we recognised a place
before it had a name.
I don’t remember who moved closer.
Maybe we both did.
The warmth of her arm against mine.
The brush of her sleeve.
And I thought…
I don’t know what I thought.
I just didn’t want to move.
Then she turned.
Close enough now
I could feel her breath.
The scent of her shampoo.
I thought she would step back.
She always does.
But she didn’t.
She stayed.
And she smiled.
—
I still feel it sometimes.
That moment.
That smile.
I don’t know why it stayed with me.
It was so long ago.
I can’t remember
what she looked like anymore.
—
I turn the photograph over.
Her handwriting sits lightly now,
softer than it was.
“I don’t know where this place is,
or if it exists,
but we will find it someday.”
Someday.
I press my fingers against the words
without deciding to,
as if pressure might hold them
where they are.
It never does.
—
The light is changing.
The sun lowers behind the hills
and the lake begins to hold it.
I can feel it before I see it.
The air goes still.
Then the water stops moving,
and the surface starts to look
like the world forgot which way was up.
For these ten minutes,
the lake stops being a lake.
Like the photograph.
Like the painting.
For a moment, I let myself have it.
Even knowing it won’t stay.
—
I remember the last time we spoke about this place.
A long time ago.
A small table.
Two glasses.
Yellow light over both of us.
The photograph was already on the table.
Her handwriting on the back,
still new.
Still hers.
I told her I found it.
The lake.
That it was real.
Exactly as we imagined.
I told her about the sunset, the water,
and about the uneven path
along the banks,
where we could see daffodils blooming
once every four months.
I don’t know why I told her that.
It didn’t seem like something she needed to know.
I stopped.
Somewhere along the line,
we moved so close
that the table stopped feeling like it was between us.
We sat there.
Neither of us spoke.
She looked at my lips.
Then my eyes.
Like she was saying something
she’d never said out loud.
I don’t know how long we stayed that way.
And somewhere in that quiet,
years came back to me at once.
Glances.
Near-touches.
Almosts.
How close we always let ourselves get.
How far we never let it go.
I looked at her.
“If we had a chance,” I said,
“to leave everything behind,
and start a new life there…”
“Would you come with me?”
I don’t remember what she said.
I don’t think she said anything.
But I remember her breath caught.
Just barely.
I thought she would pull back.
She always does.
But she didn’t.
She stayed.
And she smiled.
—
The phone began to ring.
I stopped.
It had not rung in weeks.
Not once.
The apartment was empty by then.
The furniture was gone.
The boxes.
The photographs.
There were pale marks on the walls
where things had hung for years.
I stood there for a moment,
looking at them.
The car was waiting downstairs.
The ringing continued.
It filled the empty apartment
and came back from the walls
slightly changed.
I hadn’t heard from her since we last spoke.
I told myself she needed to plan.
That she needed more time.
That she needed to be sure.
I told myself a lot of things.
The weeks went by.
Then I stopped telling myself anything at all.
I was waiting
for something
I was not sure was coming.
The phone continued to ring.
For a moment,
I could almost hear her voice.
I could hear her say yes.
That somewhere in the next few words,
she’d be beside me,
on the uneven path.
The daffodils near the bank.
Her face in the water
when the light changed.
I turned toward the sound.
One step.
Then another voice came to me.
Something kind.
Take care. Keep in touch. I’ll miss you.
Things people say to the ones they used to know.
Then again,
it might not even be her at all.
I didn’t know what was waiting
at the other end.
I don’t know what she would have said.
Sometimes I think
that was the last chance we had.
Sometimes I think
there never was one.
My hand tightened around the handle of the suitcase.
I turned.
I walked down the corridor.
It was still ringing when I reached the stairs.
Smaller with every step.
Until the building kept it.
And I didn’t.
—
The light is leaving the water.
I feel it before I see it.
Then the wind returns,
the stillness breaks,
and the lake loses the painting,
goes back to being water.
Ten minutes.
That was all of it.
I stay anyway.
Watching the grey settle back in,
the way it always does,
like it was only ever pretending
to be something else.
For another flicker.
For the wind to change its mind.
For something.
I don’t finish the thought.
I never do.
Nothing comes.
It never does.
—
The photograph is thinner in my hand than I remember.
Or maybe my hand has changed.
I can’t tell which anymore.
The ink has gone soft at the edges,
like it’s deciding whether to stay.
I try to see her face
and get pieces instead.
A shoulder.
The back of her hand.
A sound that might be a laugh
or might be something I gave her later,
when the real one wore too thin to keep.
I don’t stop to ask which.
I stopped asking a long time ago.
But the phone.
The phone I still have whole.
Every ring of it.
Still vivid.
Still echoing down the corridor.
I never had to work to keep that one.
It just stayed.
Some nights my hand still moves toward it
before I remember there’s nothing to answer.
I thought that if I didn’t answer the phone,
then she never said goodbye.
So maybe she had called.
Maybe she loved me.
Maybe if I had turned back,
if I had lifted it to my ear,
I would have heard her say it.
Maybe
somewhere inside the life
I never lived,
she came with me.
—
The light is gone from the water now.
Just the lake again.
Grey. Flat. Going nowhere.
I look down at the photograph.
My thumb finds the edge,
where the fold has worn through,
where her handwriting is almost nothing now.
I hold it out over the water.
The wind catches the corner,
lifting it slightly,
like it wants to go first.
I could let it.
One turn of the wrist.
My hand does not open.
I stand there like that for a while,
the photograph over the lake,
watching to see what my hand will do.
It doesn’t do anything.
I bring it back.
Fold it once,
the way I always do,
and put it away.
The grey settles back into itself.
No ripple.
No painting.
No breath left to catch.
Just the lake, being a lake again.
I get up.
I don’t know when I’ll come back.
That’s not true either.
I know when.
Same day.
Same hour.
Same spot.
Ten minutes,
waiting to happen again.
Featured image adapted from a photo by Mari Helin
See more on Unsplash: @mari
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