Remembering

In the back of my mind, there will always be the two of us, waiting. When I find myself thinking of you, I remember worn photographs of past wars, blurry with so much undiluted history.Until now, I find myself saving you by writing countless half-truths and surviving passages from your letters. I believe that if I let you live in me, I myself will never be lost again.

If there is anything I recall, it is not your penchant for sarcasm, nor your ability to cheat at chess, nor your laughter that was never laughter, really, but more of a forced chuckle. I will always remember your loneliness. It was, in a way, your saving grace. This loneliness rose from you as smoke, forming a generous halo around your white, knowing head. That halo would be mistaken for kindness by most, but we would know better. As the nights loomed dark without her, that halo would flourish and beam like a headlight, fueled by your silence.

You were quite the storyteller. I have learned that only men who know the veriest of tragedies usually are. You spun distractions, soft promises, great heroes for us. You could never be a hero to me because I remember days when you were as frozen and mad as any thwarted lover, waiting for your wife to come home.

Til today, it amazes me how, when people talk about marriage, they see it as the appropriate measure for love. Marriage , for most, is the armageddon, the waterloo, the eternal harbinger of endings.But for most, it's a carnival ride that is over too soon, a cork that traps in the resounding irony in an empty bottle.

I realize that it must have been very painful to see her, yet never fully owning her. She was always as free as butterflies and was not as romantic. She never said you were her sunrise. She never said in you, she found all beginnings.

It was the year 1995. The electricity was down. You have just finished telling us a story of how you saved a man from drowning. You were very brave, I'd have to say, to sacrifice yourself in this manner. You never told us what the moral of the story was. You let us figure that out for ourselves.

My brother, who always exhausted himself by mimicking you or indulging in exultant fits while you told us stories, was asleep on the couch. You were in your room, reading by candlelight.

I was bored and decided to spy on you. You were not reading after all but were looking out your window. You were so still. Your back was turned to me, stooped and defeated by years and senseless aching. I could hear you whispering, Come home to me.

You were not a god, after all. Now, I was able to love you. I was touched by your hidden admission, this fall. And since my head was so full of the urgency and the luxury of the concept of saving, I thought I could try and get you out of your unfulfilled love. I would save you. I would be your heroine in this tragedy.

Of course, truth always finds the opportunity to spit at illusions of greatness. Years passed and I didn't get to do much saving. The most that I could ever muster was to serve as your unnecessary solace, someone who had the consistency of tough bricks. You used my strength as an excuse to wait longer, to worship her better. I pity myself sometimes, remembering how content I was just to step into your shadow. But there was nothing I could really do about it. Such is the desperation of unrequited love.

What is strange is, when I was growing up, I felt a strange attraction to people who were patterned after you. During the many stages of my life, I have found myself with people who were left behind, who were suffering, who needed to be raised from cunning variations of death. And I sit there with them and wait for God knows whom or what. Sometimes, the people they wait for come back. These are the people who are easy to forget, who I bury in more than six feet of tender feeling. But there are the ones who are eternally fixated, who become strangers even to themselves because of so much useless hunger. These are the people who I bade goodbye to quickly and without sorrow. But there are those, who acknowledge my presence and turn to me for comfort. These are the people whom I have had the strength to stay with for a time.

After a while, saving will sap the strength out of a person. There are times that I wish that instead of loneliness, you gave me the gift of desirability. I wish you taught me how to be more elusively frail, more interestingly weak, more fearful of aloneness. Maybe then, I would be loved for myself. But these are the things I am dealt with. I know that there truly is no turning back.

It amazes me how I have never found anyone who was intact,as ripe as sunrise or as whole as bright, red apple. I pried people open just to find some semblance of you in their hearts, kidneys, brains.

I realize now that my life is a series of consequences of reliving you.

I believe that you are, finally, the crux of my frustration , all that I am doomed to protect, and all that I will ever have. We had all the tragedies of a cycle, really. It is here, in the splendor of my waiting, that I will remain with all my bewildered happiness. I will sing in peace, until I see you again.