Looking Back

-Do those who leave ever look back?
There’s a question in his head that he can’t answer. It bounces around and resounds, so that when the phone rings, he loses all concentration. He ignores the ringing and tries to stop the echoes of the question, and the memories they drudge up, of a past that’s long been lost. In this attempt, as the echoes lose themselves in the memories, he starts to wonder if what he misses are the people who etched themselves into his memory or if in fact the memories could have been created without them. It makes him laugh, cynically, of course. There’s a part of him that knows that memories cannot exist without essence, but there’s so many and so similar that by now he’s become accustomed to the leaving. It’s what people do he thinks. All that’s left are the memories. In those memories, the overcast sky of a moonlit stroll, the stillness of a conversation over coffee, and the stars that marked the passing of each. It’s that same scent that rouses him in the middle of the night, when all is still and the moon light struggles against the blinds. He wakes in that darkness, only to find the lingering scent of a coffee house he once visited, and it’s that coffee house he remembers. The conversation has long been lost, and who he was with, forgotten. So he questions whether he could have or would have been there, in the confines of those four walls if not for her, undoubtedly it was a her, that took him there. Or would he have made his way under the canopy of stars, guided by the light of a crescent shaped moon if not for her, another her, whoever she was. By now they all become one, an amalgamation of memory, in which none of them exists unless they all exist as one. Again the question reawakens as the memories fade into themselves and he cannot imagine time abandoned by essence, but he cannot make out a single face but in the face that they now all wear. A colorless image with the scent of a woman, that has always been there, though they have each left in time.