Heart the Lover

by Lily King

It feels like one of my jobs, to remember her.

remember she leapt like a fawn across our living room.

of literature rests on the promise that we change, we grow, have epiphanies, become better, understand our flaws.’ ‘Too late. Have you ever noticed that? It’s always too late. Oedipus, Macbeth, Raskolnikov.’

‘Someday we will remember even these our hardships with pleasure.’

She feeds me Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Bowen, Djuna Barnes, Nadine Gordimer, and Jamaica Kincaid.

These scenes that didn’t happen concentrate and distill the emotion of what did.

‘The truth has nothing to do with the facts,’

Paris. I take him to all the places where I ached for him. It was like bringing him home to kindly relatives who would share my joy. Here he is, I say to the horse chestnuts in the Luco, to my booth at Le Danton, and to the spot on the grass in the Champs de Mars

where I read his most recent letter. Here he is.

The Breach was fussy, grandmotherly, frozen in 1957. Our house full of children and animals is nothing like that. Silas is laughing. He’ll be indifferent to your scrutiny of him. He might notice it, but he won’t take interest in the verdict. Once, as we were leaving the house after dinner with a couple we didn’t know well, we heard one of them say through an open window, ‘Well, what’d you think of that?’ I slowed to hear the response, and Silas tugged me down the driveway. He did not want to know.

can feel their youth in the room, a forcefield of energy and fear and longing and confusion. I can feel it so strongly.

‘Isn’t love a form of hope?’ I said.

glaring at me now. ‘You were the one.’ I shake my head. ‘You were.

‘He’s just gonna get there a little before the rest of us.

relax a bit. When I sing this song for my boys, it’s like a fairy tale, with the mountains and diamonds and western winds. Here with Yash it becomes something different, our own saga of coming and going, of finding and losing each other, of letting go.

As soon as his voice is gone I have that feeling I often have when I’m away from my family, like they are moving farther and farther away from me, beginning to flicker faintly as distant stars and I will never ever reach them again. It feels like a premonition of the fact that someday, one by one, we will be separated from each other forever. A siren wails past. My remaining hours in this town stretch out before me. Too long and too short.

‘Do you think, really really honestly and not just to keep my hopes up, do you think I’ll be able to go on that trip to Mexico?’ ‘I do. I really, really do.’ And I do. It is my job to believe that, to know that, with my whole heart.

think we desire unity because we have felt it before and we want to feel it again. It’s our natural state.’

Eternalism is the belief that everything that is, has been, and will be exists right now and forever, all at once. Presentism is the belief that only what exists in the present exists at all. Nothing before and nothing after.

didn’t understand why she would lean toward presentism, why she would choose only the present moment—no past, no future—when she could have everything all at once for eternity. But standing here in line, with all these good people working to help others get better, it feels okay to me to have this moment and nothing else. It feels vast, open, beautiful. Only this right here right now. I feel happy. I have told him.

He makes a gesture to Sam and Sam lowers the bed a bit. Yash shuts his eyes. I see the boy I first knew. I see the boy sleeping on his back on the twin bed beneath the yellow bedspread.

come back from the bathroom and take my seat. The room is nearly empty, just Uncle Percy on his phone. I reach for Yash’s hand. But this time it is not his hand in mine. It is my mother’s hand. There is no other way to say this. It is my mother’s hand. I can see that the hand I’m holding is Yash’s, but what I feel are my mother’s plump fingers, my mother’s small, padded palm, the exact way her hand felt in mine when I was a little girl. It feels amazing.

go back around and bend over you, my love. I brush my palm over your rooster’s comb. ‘I have loved you all my life,’ I whisper. ‘See you after the next bang.’ I spin my suitcase out of the corner. I look back once. Sam is holding both your hands.

already misplaced my boarding pass. I don’t know the gate. I need to find a departures screen. I won’t ever see you again. Where will you go? What will you be?

My body gets even heavier as the plane pushes itself up further from the earth. I feel drugged and desperate for escape. I want to forget everything and go unconscious. But I don’t want to dream. I remember feeling this way when my mother died. I was afraid of dreaming about her, afraid of seeing her alive and having to lose her all over again. And I didn’t dream of her, not for a long time. I can’t stop my eyes from closing.