You tell me that years later, after his beautiful assailant had been executed, they gave him the knife that almost killed him. A gift. We wonder if he hung it on the wall, machete curve cutting shadows on the paper. We’re in the office, feet on the table between us. You buy me coffee and put the heating on and clear the floor in case I need to lie down. I like the floor but it would be further from you. After I leave I miss you for the rest of the day. Two years ago in autumn we said goodbye on the street and I was leaning against the wall, my feet between your legs, and all the way home I asked myself if I could keep going on this way because for reasons both within and beyond our control we’ll never get anything more than this: a handful of coffees in a year and perhaps a few days away from home where, surrounded by other people, we take moments of quiet closeness, tiny gestures of affection and I get to watch you from a distance, know where you are, know where you will be.
Most of the time it doesn’t hurt, time softens and settles as we live out our different lives in different places but then sometimes it does, ache stretching into the evening and the following days, when everything interesting I read or hear or think I want to tell you about, brief timeslip into a world where I call you on the way home but of course I don’t, I don’t tell you almost any of it, I don’t even have your phone number.
And then there’s so much I can never say to you even when we’re face to face so I put it here instead, the way I sent you Melville’s letters to Hawthorne in the beginning, when I was in New York and I thought about you every day. And this way I know you’ll see it so I won’t have to say it but you can at least know the breadth of my affection for you, can carry it around, somewhere out of sight, not hung on the wall but tucked in your pocket, in a book on your shelves, in case you need it, in case you want it. Years ago in that pool bar I reached for the cue in your hand and you put your palm against mine and pulled your fingers down and grasped my hand for a moment. Years ago in that elevator we stood six feet apart and when it got to your floor you stared straight ahead and said don’t even say it and I never did.
I asked myself then and I continue to ask myself now if the cost is too high but I don’t know the answer, I’ve never known the answer, have never been one to turn away from a feeling even if it guts me. If I knew how to close the loop of the story I’d put a knife on the wall but the ending is still unknowable, open-ended, and you’ve never knowingly hurt me and I doubt you ever would so instead it’s just another fact, apocryphal anecdote, blurred by time and memory, like these words which will disappear, after a while, and you’ll just have to remember that you ever saw them at all.