Walked out onto the square under steel-grey skies with saw-toothed mountains around us like witnesses. Nine months to the day, I walked through our ghosts meeting with my red satin flats dancing - treading - stepping - stopping. Here is where we met, I told my travelling companion. I looked up at the iron sky. It was almost exactly the same weather.
Back in real time; I saw you getting off the train. Oh baby; saw only a few seconds of you walking, minutae hammering home your identity - the white plane of the angular cheek, the long straight nose - enough to gasp hard and loud, enough to gouge out my insides. You were in the car behind us. Serendipity led me to a different car than you. In a different world, I got in your car. What would've been different? What could've happened? Would you have recognized me? Would I have turned away, not wanting to see you see me, hungover, tears in my eyes, removed from history? But it didn't happen. What is is. We got off at the next stop and I was shaking. I told my friend that I saw you. I wish I saw him instead, she said.
Got out at Granville, turned onto Pender. A nasty thought entered my head; I will return to all the scenes of your crimes against me. I want to see my ghost and your ghost, because I can't see you and me together. So I begin to wander, no real thought in my head, letting my body lead me. And my feet led me, without navigation, through our spectres holding hands beside sculpture and architecture. Through vocal history and spoken and unspoken desire.
This is not a message to you. You'll never find it. Lately I've been reading about string theory and quantum movement and Carl Sagan-style wormholes, parallel universes and constantly fluctuating alternate histories infecting my dreams. As a child, I used to think about all the different worlds where I was forever repeating this embarassing moment or that happy memory over and over again, forever. That somewhere, nothing ever stopped, but repeating in finitum ad nauseum, my personal museum compiled with everyone else's favorite (or not so favorite) histories. It's so beautiful and elegant it must be true.
I don't know why I miss you so much. Maybe it's this; this city, these ghosts, all these alternate possibilities converging within me while I stand mere blocks from the place you broke my heart. And under this spitting sky, my feet lead me down the sidewalks we walked, hand in hand, so long ago, when it still meant something in this world and not some other. There isn't anything I can say to fix us; there is no us, and there's no mending of what's forever broken. I don't know what happened in your worlds and I'll never know. It's most likely better that way. Physicalities can destroy me but it's nothing - and I do mean nothing - like the way truth can.
We ended the day where you and I ended, at the bar that was packed then but empty now, and I stared morosely at our ghosts sitting awkwardly at the table in the corner while I stared at my drink and you stared at your watch. Was it closure? I don't know. I don't know that I'll ever know. In time, there will be other lovers, ones who don't shut down like you do, ones that do, in fact, care for me the way I care for them. And maybe they'll end and maybe they won't. Time will tell.