What’s remembered

-“You look like you’re going to cry,” she says.
“Men don’t cry,” he says.
“It’s the impression I get,” she says.
“Impressions are false,” he says, “We do not see the world as it truly is, but as we ourselves are.”
She doesn’t say anything. They part.
The phone wakes him. It’s been a long week and even though it’s early, he could not resist the call to slumber.
“I’m miles away,” her voice over the phone.
“I didn’t expect you to stay near,” he admits into the speaker.
“It’s lonely here,” her voice crackles, bad connection.
“It’s like that everywhere,” he confesses.
“Not when I was…” the dial tone erases her voice.
He sighs and hangs up the phone.
He’s driving, one of those long drives around the city, the kind he takes to clear his head. He stops at a crosswalk, children crossing. Looking out the window he sees long black wavy hair. It’s her, he thinks. Someone honks from behind and he sees the children have made it to the other side. He accelerates. He searches the street. She’s gone.
You never said you loved me, he could see her lips forming the words and the sad expression in her eyes, in his mind.
You ran away, he thinks, the words echoing in his head.
Because you never said you loved me, the words falling from her lips, as her expression follows, into gloom.
But I did, he thinks, the words repeating themselves.
Her image disappears into the barren highway ahead of him. He drives on.
Her tears fall and she presses her head against the pillow, muffling the sobs that escape her. She steals a glance out the window, in between sobs. The moon light dances across the shifting waves. The window is covered with condensation. Her sob into the pillow, once more, the breeze she stirs with this movement causes the candle to flicker.
“Goodnight,” she hears his voice in the quiet darkness of her room, her face in the pillow.
“I don’t want you to go,” her whisper, from that night, as she held onto him.
“I know…I don’t want to,” his response, as he leaned in close, speaking softly into her ear.
“Goodnight,” her last words that night.
They ring in her ear, just spoken. She breathes deeply, her eyes closed.
He unlocks the mailbox, grabs up everything inside; the junk mail, bills, and he notices an odd shape. He takes it inside, sifts through it. It’s a postcard. No return address, just a postcard with a scribbled note. No signature, but he recognizes the penmanship.
It’s been a long year, it says.
I’m still here…wondering, it says.
I’ve taken up smoking, it says, with a little burn mark.
It feels like I have too much time, sometimes…, and x after ellipsis.
He lights a cigarette and adds his own burn mark. Sits and thinks about the beach on the front of the postcard.
I think of you, she writes, I think about your life.
I think about you too, he writes back, I have for years.
I stay up thinking, she writes, even now, about you.
So much time, he writes, I wonder what you remember.