Beyond That, the Sea

by Laura Spence-Ash

The present’s hardly there; the future doesn’t exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.

How sweet that moment is, that moment of before. When anticipation is everything. When everything is new. When there are no consequences, when there is no after.

She could no longer imagine the two of them together. This thing she had thought about for so many years. This thing that she had wanted. They no longer belonged together. And she knew that he knew that, too.

Some secrets are weights to be borne. Others are gifts, little bits of warmth, to be revisited again and again. No one else ever needed to know. No one else had the right to know. It was theirs and theirs alone.

She stood and brushed out her dress as she lit a cigarette and watched the little boat meander through the water, utterly at the whim of the current. “Be safe,” she called. “I will miss knowing you’re in the world.”

Don’t you wish we could just go back, William says, almost as though he knows what Gerald is thinking. To those days? When everything was so simple? No, Gerald says, I don’t. I’m much happier now, as an adult. I know who I am, I know what’s important to me. And that really is the truth.

Dead or alive, we carry these people with us.