Castaway

A notebook entry.

Getty

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It's already vanished, this thing I was going to say, but do you know how sometimes in life you will meet someone and you will cling to them, cling to their body like a raft in the ocean and you a sailor, after your ship and all it has carried was lost?

Have you ever made of another person’s body a whole world, whole nights passing like ocean currents beneath the mosquito nets, and you holding fast in the water, skin like wet wood, dark and smooth?

Have you ever dreamed your way through time, dreamed yourself back into the forgotten territories, the depths where the lost days now fall, silent and unseen, friable, drifting down into darkness like marine snow?

What was it they said in that movie, about the lovers on the bridge, how you should call the people in your dreams when you’re awake?

If I dream of you, should I call?

You are not the only thing that vanishes when the dream ends—I vanish, too.

You once told me that you looked for me in the bodies of other women, after, and I wanted to know, did you find me there?

Years pass and I am still in love with ridiculous things, like the red neon light above the tabac near the café that I like, and the blue light beneath it, and how together they turn the pale buildings purple in the early morning, in the autumn.

Have you read the newspapers lately and seen what they’ve done to the world? Have you seen what they’ve done to it? Are you still the same person you were then, all those years ago, and would you recognize me?

A cool October day, verging towards chill, and the high thin clouds like lace over the pale blue. I still love you, you know, but only in the way we love the people we were always going to love forever.

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