Echoes
It is April, and even the air feels different than it did before. I sit in a teal Adirondack chair on the deck with my mom, listening to the Lumineers’ album Cleopatra for the first time and staring out at the lights in town below. The song “Angela” comes on and I feel like I want to cry, because it is beautiful, and because he is gone and everything makes me feel like crying.
We both teared up the night we first said I love you, shaking our heads at each other because neither of us knew what the hell was happening. He’d buried his head in my shoulder before popping back up and saying he thought he was falling in love with me.
Where did you come from? He would always ask me. Where did you come from? Like I was a miracle that had fallen from the sky. Like he was ready for everything. You. He’d say. You.
The forlorn chords fill the air, and I pull my knees into my chest, holding myself. Angela, spent your whole life running away.
* * *
For the first few weeks after he leaves, I spend the day clenching my insides until I can make it to my car. One of my fourth graders asks me if I feel sad, and I bite my lip and turn my back to the class. In the car I unclench, and everything comes flooding in that I’ve been white-knuckling to the back of my head all day. I drive home in traffic after getting my oil changed, and I breathe in gasps.
It was New Years, and we were in a Forest Service cabin seven miles from the nearest road, and temperatures were steadily dropping below zero. We were standing outside the cabin with our friends, drinking moonshine and setting off fireworks. We listened to them crackle and take off into the dark night, climbing higher and higher before falling in a slow, bright arc toward the snow.
When our friends went inside, he’d pulled me into his gigantic down jacket and said I love you in that hard, deliberate way that lets you know they want to be the last one to say it. I felt the universe rooted to that very spot, everything else blurry around us. We were what was holding us there.
In the car I breathe in gasps until I don’t have the energy anymore, until they settle into slow, quiet inhales and exhales. Breaths that sound different, but feel the same.
* * *
There’s a bowl in my kitchen that I love. It’s teal and handmade, and the perfect size for dinner for one. His mother gave it to me and I have mixed feelings about continuing to use it, but I like the bowl and I only have four in my house, and his mother didn’t do anything wrong.
At Thanksgiving we were at his parents’ house in Southwest Colorado. His father had built the entire house with his own two hands on a plateau overlooking the San Juans, a view that had caused me to utter an audible “holy shit” on the way to the composting toilet the first morning I’d been here. We went ski touring with his older brother off Red Mountain Pass, and shot a spud launcher in the backyard, and ate Thanksgiving dinner around the wood stove. I sat on the floor of the small living room and pet his dogs, his sister and I laughed at each other’s jokes, and his mother invited me back for Christmas. When we left in a few days, I would get a rare hug from his stoic father, a quiet man who could not have been more of the West.
And all that weekend when I looked at him, I felt like I was looking at my life.
The last night in his parents’ house, I went to bed early and he walked out to the retreat his brother was building on the property a couple hundred yards away.
Go, I’d said, talk to your brother. But come back and sleep next to me.
He kissed me and promised he would, and walked out into the night.
I woke at 6am in his bed, with enough empty space next to me to stretch my arm out all the way to the other side. The sheets were cold, and I curled into myself. Outside, daylight draped itself over the San Juans.
I sit in front of the teal bowl and look at the chair in my kitchen where he used to sit. He’s not there, and he’s not going to be there. It doesn’t matter how much someone’s mother loves you, or how close the retreat is to the house. If they don’t want to come back, they won’t.
* * *
I’ve just gotten back from a long trail run and I’m standing in line at my favorite deli in town. I’ve just started doing this–going back to my places, daring to put myself in a position where I could be bumped into.
I haven’t been here to get a sandwich for a while, since a Sunday afternoon a couple months before. We’d been lying in bed and I asked him a throwaway question I thought I’d already gotten the answer to ages before when we’d driven through Durango and looked at rent prices for apartments. The question I thought I’d already gotten the answer to when we’d spent a night at my kitchen table watching videos about building tiny homes. A question that involved the word “someday,” and renewing our current separate leases for at least another year.
But that day when I’d asked him, he’d stared at me and said he didn’t know, and then nothing was the same as it had been before. He looked at me like he knew he was hurting me and couldn’t stop himself. We lay there for a while, both of us trying to figure out what it was that was happening. We stood up and went to a different room to see if that would make things make sense, but it didn’t.
After a few hours, we walked down the hill to the deli, as if that would fix everything that he hadn’t been able to say. I sat in silence in a chair across from him at a table on the sidewalk, eating only half my sandwich and taking frequent sips of iced tea just for something to do.
We walked back up the hill when we were done, and I was glad I had sunglasses on. He put his arm around me and pulled me in as if he could protect me from what I was feeling, as if the person bringing on the tears and wiping them away weren’t the same.
In a few days he would tell me that none of it had meant what I thought, that he was in this, that everything was fine. In a week he’d call me when I was out to dinner with my dad in Telluride and tell me loved me as he hung up the phone.
In two weeks, he’d sit on my couch and hold me as a last gesture to our relationship and I’d tell him it sounded like he didn’t want to live with anyone, and he would say it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that. He would bring up the woman and the house and the little dog that he’d abandoned years before in the exact same way, and I would realize then that it was the person he wanted to be, rather than the person he was, who had made all the promises.
In two weeks, the person he was would kiss my cheeks and forehead six times in the dark entryway of my house and tell me he’d be thinking of me, and then he would be gone. He’d meant everything he’d ever said, but none of it was true.
My eyes flicker over the sandwich he always ordered, and I breathe out. I step forward. It’s my turn.
* * *
It’s mid-November when I realize I don’t have to check the grocery store parking lot for his blue truck when I pull in. It is the week before Thanksgiving, and by now he will be in a raft on the Grand Canyon. He’d pulled the coveted permit right around the time we met, nearly two years earlier. A few months after he’d gotten the permit, he and I sat facing each other on a raft on the Smith River in Montana, he rowing, and I drinking a PBR.
We were talking about the Grand Canyon. I beat around the bush and asked questions I hoped would prompt him to indicate if I would be invited to fill one of the sixteen spots. We had only been dating for a few months, but we were in it. The night before he’d held my face in the tent and told me that I was what everyone was looking for and he had found me. He had found me. The Grand Canyon trip was over a year and a half from then.
Your name is on the spreadsheet, he told me, as if it were the easiest answer he’d ever had to give.
This isn’t really about the Grand Canyon, I said.
He smiled back without hesitation or doubt. He knew.
What I wanted had nothing to do with a seat on a raft, but rather with certainty. He would promise me both, and give me neither.
I pull into the parking lot of the grocery store, knowing this is the last time I will ever know exactly where he is.
* * *
Camping in the desert outside Moab, I wake in the middle of the night because I am cold and there are coyotes howling out in the vastness somewhere. They are close, and there are a few of them, it sounds like. I am too cold to fall back asleep and so I lay there, flexing and unflexing my muscles to try to warm up, and listen to them howl.
I remember a night in January when I’d been lying in a bed next to him in a yurt in the San Luis Valley and woke up to the sound of coyotes in the distance. It had seemed like a threat then, and even with actual walls surrounding me, I felt alone and uneasy. I felt exposed, like something was coming for me I couldn’t escape.
But here, now, in Utah, I listen to the coyotes, with only the nylon tent walls between me and their cries and I do not feel afraid.
* * *
After work one day I grab my puffy jacket and a box cutter and go around the side of my house to finally deal with the massive cardboard boxes I’ve let sit there and rot since the spring, when I decided it was finally time to have a bed frame. To at least feel like I was sleeping somewhere different from where we slept together. But the boxes had remained, shoved next to the trash bins, on the side of the house for months.
My hands stinging from the cold, I start to cut up the cardboard, mangled from getting wet and drying out many times over the last few months. I discover the box of the new vacuum I bought when I bought the bed frame, shoved full of papers and other items I thought I’d already gotten rid of. When I pick it up, a few things fall out, including the card he made for our anniversary.
We celebrated it not knowing that our relationship was already in its twilight days. He’d written in Sharpie on a picture of a skier he’d pulled out of a magazine, and I think to myself how seeing someone’s handwriting is almost like hearing their voice. I am about to shove it back into the vacuum box without looking at it, but I don’t. I want to see what will happen– if I open it and read the words he wrote, that were meaningful to me at the time, when I was sitting in a black dress across the table from him in a nice restaurant in Taos.
I unfold the glossy magazine paper and read the slanted chicken scratch, words that felt important because of the occasion, but that in themselves are not particularly warm or heartfelt. He had been trying, certainly, but even then something inside him was screaming to cut and run. Something was preventing him from writing “I love you” on a card for our anniversary.
I read it now and it seems like I could be reading a card to his ski buddy, to anyone. I read the words, read his sign-off of “muah,” read his name. And the only thing I feel is the cold on my hands.