I wrote your name on the inside of my wrist last Tuesday in pen, just to see if I could still spell it without flinching. I could. That, I think, was the worst part. Three syllables, the loop of the second letter the way you always made it, the small crooked finish — and then nothing. No tremor, no heat, no pulse in the throat. The body, it turned out, had filed you away with the rest of the dead languages.
I am writing this from the kitchen of the apartment you have never seen. There is a window above the sink, and beyond it the brick wall of another building so close you could spit and hit it, and between the two walls a kind of soft grey weather that I have come to call mine. I bought the chairs alone. I bought the bowls alone. I learned, alone, that I prefer my coffee bitter, which surprised me, because for two years I drank it the way you took yours and called that taste love.
What I want to tell you is small. It is not a confession in the operatic sense. I am not going to write that I dream of you, because I don't, or not often, and when I do you appear at the edge of the dream like a coat someone left on a chair. What I want to tell you is that on Thursday I was buying lemons and the man at the register had your hands. Just that. The same blunt thumbs, the same way of folding a paper bag down twice and creasing it, as if a paper bag were a letter that needed sealing. I stood there with my lemons and I felt the floor go thin under me, the way it used to when you would come up behind me in the hallway and not touch me — just stand there, just breathe — and I would feel the entire shape of you against the entire shape of me without a single point of contact.
You used to do that on purpose. I know you did. You used to count, I think, how long I could stand it before I turned around.
I am not going to write about the bed. I promised myself when I sat down that I would not write about the bed, and I won't, not directly. But I will say this: there was a way you had of stopping. Of bringing a thing almost to its given conclusion and then, very deliberately, withdrawing the hand or the mouth or the weight of you, and letting me feel the absence as if it were a second body. You called it patience. I called it nothing because I had no word for it then. I have a word for it now. I am not going to write it down.
The woman I am seeing is kind. I want to be clear about that, in case this letter ever finds you, in case some impossible weather carries it across the years and the two cities and the marriage you are presumably still inside of. She is kind. She laughs with her whole chest. She does not stop. She arrives and arrives and arrives, and afterward she falls asleep with her hand open on my hip, palm up, like a small dish waiting for rain. I am learning, slowly, what it is to be loved without being studied. It is a quieter country. There are fewer mirrors in it.
But I wanted you to know — and this is the part I have been circling, the part the whole letter exists to deliver and then bury — that I understood, finally, what you were doing. Not at the time. At the time I thought it was cruelty dressed as restraint, and I forgave it because I was twenty-six and I mistook every withholding for depth. I thought later it was cowardice. For a long stretch in my early thirties I was certain it was cowardice, and I hated you with the clean specific hatred one reserves for people who taught one to want something they had no intention of giving. But it wasn't cowardice. I see that now. You were teaching me how to live inside a wanting that would not be answered. You were teaching me, in the only language you had, that the body's deepest pleasure is sometimes the pleasure of not being delivered. You did not know you were teaching me. You thought you were just being careful. The most precise educations are always accidental.
I use it now, what you taught me. I use it badly and I use it well. I use it when I write. I use it when I am with her, and I am not proud of this, I am not proud of carrying you into a bed that was supposed to be free of you — but there it is. The pause before the kiss. The hand that hovers. The sentence I leave unfinished because I have learned that the unfinished sentence is the one the listener finishes inside their own mouth, and that is the sentence they will remember.