# 5. Uncertainties.

On the whole, I like to imagine you as happy. You do not wear the face - a foreboding mask of fury and hurt - that I turned my back to, on what has proven to be our final encounter. Instead, I picture the jovial expression that grins lop-sidedly out at me from a photo we once took of ourselves. It is deftly hidden in my underwear draw, beneath the lacy pastels of apple green and lavender that you were once so familiar with.

I picture the strong contours of your jaw, it's resolute cleft a home to the copious amounts of ash blonde stubble that you went to such lengths to maintain. I would admonish you for it, but secretly admired the animalistic ease with which the hair seemed to sprout. It was mature and suave, while we ourselves were not. I look at that picture of us and imagine myself running my hand over your cheek, the way I did so often in the old days, and for a moment - just a moment - everything is bearable. But then I think of someone who isn't me doing the same thing...I think of her nibbling on your chin...making you chuckle...having that same exclusivity to the characteristic fissure that I loved so much, and then I can't think about you anymore.

I save the photo for rainy days, but when the sky clouds over, menacingly grumbling like our old yellow tractor, and I find myself confined within walls that hum with the memory of you, I have a change of heart. It is on days like this that I do not wish you well. Instead, I imagine you into an extremity of all the things I am feeling myself. Some days, you crouch over your knees, hunched into a slovenly ball that rocks back and forth to the rhythmic whisper of my name. Other days, I am even less merciful in my mental renditions of your misery...you have no home to crouch in, and instead, cry out for me, your hardened hands tearing at greasy bedraggled hair, from every back-way and street corner. Sometimes I even scan the leaf-choked gutters as I walk through town, fancifully hoping to catch you pining for me so hopelessly.

I don't mean to be spiteful. Truth is, I miss you, some days with a need that takes precedence over the mundane eccentricities one must execute to keep oneself alive. I forget to eat. I don't sleep. I yearn for you, and it gives me comfort to envision you yearning for me with the same self-destructive desperation.

How did we let things get so out of hand? I recant. I already know.

But we couldn't have helped it happening, you know, and even if we could have, we didn't. You didn't know what you were asking...begging me to do. Or not to do.
I said things that I meant to mean, but didn't, and you said things that you meant but didn't mean to say. We both felt mortally wounded, and though it wasn't the doing of the blown glass paperweight I threw at you - the one my grandmother gave me at graduation - nor the wooden chair you overturned that I later tripped over and broke my arm on - in a way, we both were.

And nobody even knew about it.

Well, nobody except for Norah. Darling Norah. At least you were here for that, when she...but I can't bear to think about that. I wrote her this afternoon...talking to her has always been the next best thing to talking to you.

I just wish that one of you would talk back.

But wishing isn't getting.