Spells for Forgetting

by Adrienne Young

He laughed suddenly, and the sound of it made me feel like the air was being sucked out of the room. I loved that sound.

I’d know her anywhere. Her hands, her frame. I could pick out the sound of her voice in a sea of people if I had to.

Just laying eyes on her made me feel grounded in a way I never did.

In my mind, I was going home. To Emery.

sad. “I know you feel like I left you here, but you followed me everywhere I went.”

This was the breath and flesh of what I’d known before. The thing I sometimes couldn’t believe had ever been real, like August said. But it was. My whole body was singing with the memory of it.

For fourteen years, it felt like I’d been counting down the minutes, the seconds, to a moment that I thought would never come. He was an ache inside of me that would never be soothed. And it was a pain I didn’t even want to be freed from.

Adrienne what are you doing to me!!!!

I’d been in love with August Salt since before I knew what the words meant. I don’t know when it happened—the narrow space between seconds, when a spark like the birth of a hundred stars found a home in my blood. Since then, every day had been colored with the glittering light of it dragging me in its wake, pulling me beneath its surface. And I didn’t care. If this was what it was like to drown, then for the rest of my life, I didn’t want to take another sip of air.

She was so beautiful that I could hardly stand to look at her. It physically hurt to feel her skin under my fingertips.

“We need to talk about this,” I said. “What?” “Me and you.” She wet her lips, sitting up straighter as she closed the file in front of her. “Okay.” “I can’t stay here,” I began. “I know.” “But after last night, I don’t know how I’m going to leave if you’re not coming with me.”

THIS MAN

We didn’t have time to dance around this thing. I’d lost any shred of pride a long time ago when it came to Emery.

“I’m not the same girl you gave those ferry tickets to, August.” “But you kept them,”

I’d known the moment I saw her standing in the road after I arrived on the island. I’d known it the first time I kissed her. The first time I’d told her that I loved her. I couldn’t be anyone else’s because I was hers. I’d always be hers. If she wasn’t going to say it, then I would.

“I know we’ve both had a life since the last time we were together, but I’m so tired of being without you. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

If he hadn’t asked me to leave, I was almost certain I would have followed him anyway.

The feel of him was still alive on my skin, making me tremble. It was a kind of magic that scared me. Because if I lost August Salt a second time, I wasn’t sure I would survive it.

“Oma”—my voice was brittle—“she had my necklace.”

I AM INTERALLY SCREAMING

I’d chosen August over him. And I’d do it again.

We’d had no beginning, I realized. We just always were.

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.