The Fifth Annual Astronomy Conference, Calgary, 1972, a big white book that would slot perfectly into the box that had once held Brazilian bananas, was the last on the list. It slipped its secret onto the floor with such silence that I didn’t notice.
It wasn’t until I carried the boxes to the car that I saw her. Smiling, about to say something, a cherubic baby Jeremy in her arms, looking up at me from the cold stone floor.
I picked her up and held her in my hand. And I felt that she was so far away that this was the closest I could ever come to holding her again. I hadn’t heard from Meena since the previous Christmas. Jeremy would have been nineteen years old by then. I wondered if he had begun to resemble his father – the creaseless professor whom I had disliked all those years ago. When they left, I’d held a hope in my heart that she might not be able to stick it and might come back, but they had moved south and found home in a city named for a certain President Ho Chi Minh. A man who had once, a long time ago, given me some excellent advice.
I surveyed the quiet living room.
I took Humphrey’s love for granted sometimes, which is something you can only do when you’re really secure in someone’s affection. But I know he was happy and I know I was too.
You’ll find him … or her, Humphrey had said on the occasion of our very last meeting.
So I sat down and wrote her a letter, and then I posted it before I had the chance to change my mind.
a forest has grown between us
in the first silences, little leaves and shoots grew, still so small that we could crush them if we chose, but we stayed silent, never walking the space between us, never crunching underfoot the buds and the grass that were growing there
with every month that passed, our untravelled distance became thorny with the beginnings of a tree that blocked my way, and i didn’t have the courage to travel that space between us. i felt tired thinking of scratching knees on tall thickets
when the seasons changed and changed and changed and the hedges and brambles thickened, to walk to you would be to take a chainsaw and fight my way through what time had done to the space between us
until one day, the space between us, so solid with life in the middle, so thick with wide trunks and leaves, so green and dense and dark, had closed into a wall and i could no longer see you on the other side
to travel that distance between us now would be to risk my life
and what if i cleared a path, fought my way through that forest only to find on the other side
that you’re not there?
m x
Old Friend
‘MARGOT?’
‘Yes?’
‘Would it be weird if I said I love you?’
‘Not at all.’
‘It’s just, I think you need to know, I love you.’
‘I love you too, Lenni.’
‘What was Vietnam like?’
‘Amazing. It was hot and busy and so alive. I could hardly believe all this life had been going on while I’d been living alone in Humphrey’s old farmhouse. And of course, there was Meena.’
‘Did you find her?’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘We burned the forest down.’
I followed Margot to the airport sometime in 1999. After a long flight with two stop-overs, we landed at Tan So’n Nht Airport. It wasn’t the heat but the humidity that hit us as we made the uncertain journey from the plane to the quiet airport terminal. It was night and ours was the last flight arriving before morning. I didn’t have any baggage, so I walked freely, following Margot as she juggled papers and phrasebooks and her passport. She was nervous. She’d booked the flight and packed before she’d had time to prepare herself. Which was a blessing and a curse. Time would have calmed her, but it also might have stopped her.
She needn’t have worried, though. The almost-stranger half a world away that she’d placed her trust in was waiting for her. He looked like Meena; he had the same face shape and he had her eyes. He was tall, though, and hadn’t quite yet grown into himself. He was holding up a hand-drawn sign with Margot’s name on it, and Margot, upon the relief of seeing him, ran to him and wrapped him up in a big hug.
I followed them both, listening to them talk, hearing Margot explain that she’d met him when he was no more than a cherub and him telling Margot that he recognized her at once because wherever they had lived, his mother had hung up a picture in a gold frame: a blurred photograph of Meena and Margot at a party. Margot was wearing a green dress and they were dancing, spinning with their arms crossed and held together. It went with them wherever they went, he said.