Spells for Forgetting

by Adrienne Young

I’d lived enough years now to know that there were some ghosts that haunted you forever.

But we both knew there were no coincidences on Saoirse.

The island had a way of doing that—claiming things for her own.

It was the pitiful hope of a heartbroken girl, and even though I knew those tickets were like a slow poison creeping through my veins, I’d kept them.

She was still so beautiful, in that kind of sea-swept way she’d always been. It hurt to look at her.

It took longer than I wanted to admit for me to realize that I couldn’t cut him from me. That some part of him had been fused to places I couldn’t even see. It followed me wherever I went. And each day when the sun went down, I dreaded that moment that the aching would find me again.

It had never mattered what was said, because we always returned to each other. Like gravity. For the tiniest sliver of a moment, I forgot the last fourteen years. The fire. The months that followed. The half-life I’d made when we left. For a moment, there was no after.

“There are spells for breaking and spells for mending. But there are no spells for forgetting,”

But there in the kitchen, almost three hundred miles away, I could hear my grandmother’s time-worn voice recounting the oldest of Saoirse’s legends: That if you left the island, it would always call you back.