Where She Went

“Please,” I hold up my hands. “Please don’t. .”
“No, you’re right. You have to let me say this, Adam!
You have to hear it. It would’ve been easier to die. It’s not that I want to be dead now. I don’t. I have a lot in my life that I get satisfaction from, that I love. But some days, especially in the beginning, it was so hard. And I couldn’t help but think that it would’ve been so much simpler to go with the rest of them. But you — you asked me to stay. You begged me to stay. You stood over me and you made a promise to me, as sacred as any vow.
And I can understand why you’re angry, but you can’t blame me. You can’t hate me for taking your word.”
Mia’s sobbing now. I’m wracked with shame because I brought her to this.

She looks at me, square in the eye. Taking aim. And then she pulls the trigger. “Because I hated you.”
The wind, the noise, it all just goes quiet for a second, and I’m left with a dull ringing in my ear, like after a show, like after a heart monitor goes to flatline.
“Hated me? Why?”
“You made me stay.” She says it quietly, and it almost gets lost in the wind and the traffic and I’m not sure I heard her. But then she repeats it louder this time. “You made me stay!”
And there it is. A hollow blown through my heart, confirming what some part of me has always known.
She knows.
The electricity in the air has changed; it’s like you can smell the ions dancing. “I still wake up every single morning and for a second I forget that I don’t have my family anymore,” she tells me. “And then I remember.
Do you know what that’s like? Over and over again. It would’ve been so much easier. .” And suddenly her calm facade cracks and she begins to cry.

If you stay, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll quit the band, go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I’ll do that, too. Maybe coming back to your old life would just be too painful, maybe it’d be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I’d do it. I can lose you like that if I don’t lose you today. I’ll let you go. If you stay.

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink.”

I know this will all come out soon enough, and while I want to spare Mia the circus, I don’t care if the whole world knows we’re together.

It’s my turn to see you through,” she whispers, coming back to me and wrapping me in her blanket as I lose my shit all over again. She holds me until I recover my Y chromosome.

Andante con moto e poco rubato.”

Letting go. Everyone talks about it like it’s the easiest thing. Unfurl your fingers one by one until your hand is open. But my hand has been clenched into a fist for three years now; it’s frozen shut. All of me is frozen shut. And about to shut down completely.

For a second I think of that line in Casablanca when Bogart says: Of all the gin joints in the world, she has to walk into mine. But then I remind myself that I walked into her gin joint.

Her hair, long and dark, is down now, swimming damply against her bare shoulders, which are still milky white and covered with the constellation of freckles that I used to kiss. T