Narrator

by
Jordan Rosenfeld

     Ever since he left me, he has shown up as the narrator of my travels. Wherever I go, there he is with that grin, his thin upper lip rolled away like an old desk top, reminding me of things, things that didn't even happen to me, like a pre-recorded history in French on a tour. Or he is there teasing me when I start to panic about making the next train connection, giving me the old irksome advice to stay in the moment. I used to think that was very good advice, advice coming from someone whose experiences had made him wise. Now I think the present moment was as long as he dared to let go, was the most he could allow his heart to open without fear of being sucked away by the agoraphobia of intimacy.
     It has been months since I have seen him and even more months since I saw him on good terms. He has slipped away into the nether world of exes, begging me to forget him, to forget we were ever in love, sliding away like the waning moon into a thin spinster crescent until dark. And heaven knows I tried, fled the scene, packed myself into a small blue rucksack and left my street, my state, my country. I expect him to be nothing more than an echo. But instead he has become my tour guide, bringing forth into the surprised chambers of my memory his stories. In my head I see, not the open marketplaces spilling cheese and fruit and wine out onto the streets of Paris, but clear as my own hotel room, pubs where he drank and sang until morning, azure blue Adriatic waters, the ghost-filled melancholy of Auschwitz in Poland. And not one of these memories is my own, they all belong to him.
     With these bandit memories briefly comes the dappled creamy peach of his cheeks and the hair like a freshly-minted copper penny. I still, regretfully, see the long tallow fingers, the softest curve of his lower back where I liked to rest my cheek, the smooth protruding hillock of belly where I liked to plant my lips. These images, like flashes of sculpted Rodin nudes, follow me around, through the tiny streets, over the amazing Parisian bridges where the light catches like spider webs falling. He will not retreat. He takes his leisure with my mind, making his way into my dreams, sometimes in guilt or remorse with sobs or head in hands, other times to snub me as he passes by. As if to say he hasn't decided himself whether to forget or to remember.
     But while he waits to make a choice, I remember for him: long, lonely days in a town so small it almost choked out his heart. Classrooms full of heartbreakingly beautiful young Czech women who would have gladly run into the dark hollows of his building to be taken by an American man, a half-love borne out of need, need he would have to discount in me later. And once in awhile, one of ours creeps in, a July night making love with the stars and the crickets and our bodies whistling. But those memories are still forbidden, he seems to say, turning his non-corporeal visage away. I don't know how we hold onto these memories. He can only live in the moment, while I only live in the past.
     These borrowed memories induce me to see things as he would. I would not have had the strength to spend thirty days in these foreign countries alone without them. Through his eyes, everything has a moral, a lesson. But I am not fooled completely. I have not lost complete sight of the line that draws the separate shapes of him and me. My heart still aches with too much soreness, my sleep is still too restless to be so free.
     He continues to show up despite my great effort to sever. And I resent him for showing up, but I cannot seem to get out, to be free. I search for all the reasons, the explanations, and then it sinks in that he has not let me go. He must want to, he thinks he should, but even from the long moat of silence between us, he has not yet. And we are on opposite ends of the same damn thread, pulling, like two fingers inside those Chinese toy finger cuffs. The harder we pull, the tighter we stay locked.

Jordan Rosenfeld is a writer. Fire writer, skeleton writer, loooove writer. She is as far from her twenty-five years as she is in them. She is a writer because she listens to herself and in crowds and when nobody is watching on the bus. Mary Oliver is her personal savior.

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