A prose reminiscence from JESSE KENG SUM LEE.
Framed by the dimming light from the balcony, coarse sunlight turned flitting and apologetic, I looked at the back of his head. His face stayed trained on the computer screen. White glow, black lines in his eyes, I’m sure. I’ll never know what he looked like that night.
The tide was changing as I put on my shoes. It always did this time of night, as clockwork, as precise as my goodbyes had been every Sunday. But in my sentiment, the waves felt kinder then than they ever had. Receding, as though giving space for me to see what hides beneath the froth. A patch of wet sand, in my mind’s eye, to sink my heels into. A place to carve my last word. My eyes blinked with salt and dried exhaustion.
I watched him for a moment, unmoving, taking in the room that I lost so much in. The bed that I sullied night after night with vice. The walls with my handprints and confessions stained onto its surface. Everything I had lost and replaced with something that was his, etched inside me like embroidery.
His words stayed in the air, trailed into my breath and exhaled with gravity. The silence that followed, the silence he gave and I followed into, was a kindness that I didn’t fully understand then.
He’ll see me in Europe. A blank blue canvas. I wonder if the waters there will look different from home: an ocean waiting to become familiar. He and I will sew a bridge out of striped birch bark, what’s bare and old pushed out by the new.
I will be changed. He will be the same. And the sea will make us forget everything that makes us awful.