MOURNING DOVE

Fast flight, bullet-straight vector.
Wings make sharp whistling noise.
One of the most hunted species.

WE BOTH HAVE TICKETS in our pockets. My ship, his plane. We don’t know how to greet each other. Nothing is as I had imagined. I am frailer, wilder. He is toughened. We are fallen. But when we move closer to each other it is the same. Parched hearts, earth-struck, everything gold. He takes my hand and kisses the ends of my fingers. A welter of heat in my insides. I have been so numb, it makes me aware of how much my body suffered, separate from him. I am reminded how remarkable his movements are. His mesmerizing eyes, their mad quick glitter. How they knife into you. I am immediately brought back to the agony of him. The touch of him is all. It slices my past from me. It is hopeless to try to recover my sense of what is happening, the surface of my mind slips. This moment will never play out slow enough. His presence so sharp I feel it in my teeth. His cool skin. He smells like the forest. This history of skin. Every organ in slow articulation. A list of hungers. The pull and click, the honesty of shameless coarse desire. My obedience to it. Shoulder, mouth, wrist, neck. How quickly he alters me. My mind burns. When someone is killed. When a baby dies. When someone returns from the dead. When death is woven into every single thing. It seems ridiculous to give up anything, however imperfect. To not simply dwell in the miracle of the body—it is stronger than anyone thinks. He touches my face, my hair, blown and knotted as though I am at sea. I wonder if he sees that I have lost my youth. He would never say it, but it would be true. Of all the death. Of everyone vanished. All this weight that came suddenly, the burden of it. And then, he stands here in full tide. Alive. It is so surprising, that we insisted, it seems, on living. We hold each other with sounds of gears shifting, shoes on cobblestones, and voices speaking in a different languages all around us. He kisses me, gravely, sensually. Everything goes silent for the length of a single breath. My heart deepens its beat. That familiar feeling of being both hollowed out and then completely filled, with what I am never sure. My mind filled with a thousand things I cannot tell. He says he thought he would never find me. I say I thought he was dead. He looked for me in Paris, but I had left. Taking nothing. He hadn’t, at first, accepted this as an explanation. I notice he has new clothes, but this isn’t what creates difference. I see that something else has changed. He carries himself differently. His world caught. His movements unfamiliar. A buoyancy lost. But then I understand it is not he who has changed but me. That he has always had the knowledge that life evades. That we grasp it only for a moment. It is what makes him untouchable, yet oddly more alive.

I am engaged.

His voice like the centre of a flame.

My heart snaps in two.

I see the dark beginning to unwhorl. I try to think of when I last was looking at him. Time is so different, I think, when we are in pain, when we suffer.

An American, he says. She will get me to New York.

My body grows so cold it feels like burning.

She helped with my papers.

My hands tremble. A jolting pain like a nick to the arteries.

She is wealthy.

My eyes rip the pavement below his feet. Trying to comprehend what he says though I am still taking him in, I am still with him, the image of him. Stunned that he can announce he is leaving, as though he is an ordinary man with an ordinary fiancée.

He is held back by torment. Ivory. His eyes search my eyes. They contain all we cannot alter. He says, The only person I have ever loved is you.

And I think, That is a lie that tells the truth.

The only way I know how to express myself is to offer him my body. From the top of my skull downward a scalding pain. He knows what I think. That too much has passed between us. Too many things, and how would you begin to tell? But we are forced to go on as people do.

I can’t find my pitch. I’m gone. Everything in me that was you is gone. Lev. Can’t you see? But this is not what I say. Instead I walk back with him to my rented room like an animal dragging a trap. It is bright with the last available light. The tree out the window, with its good practical leaves like a memorized poem. Each of us with so much to say, but acutely aware that words so often say nothing. They strike the wrong spot. They force you to give up. Maybe this is why we use the same two dozen words for everything. And the truth is, you could search your entire life and you would never find a phrase that would even remotely fit this moment. I know Lev doesn’t feel this way. He says words can be as precise as an arrow.

He tells me he hasn’t painted in so long it feels like injury.

I gave away all my art supplies, I say. Everything.

It is possible to begin again.

His words are pressed, lasting. He is right. This notion of what must be moved toward is inside me like a separate person. I know, I say. What I want is to tell him everything, but there is no translation. And what good would it be, if we were able to tell all there is to tell?

Ivory. Where are you? You seem. Separate.

We are silent.

I learned it from you.

Nothing can keep me from you.

You, the one who has never needed anyone.

His voice splinters in the altercation at street level below. Shouts, the crush of metal. Everything neither real nor unreal. I am reminded of how he is not bound by common standards of love or morality. He brings beauty to the room, as he always has. I love him for this alone.

His hands on my ribs. Impossible to stop. Burrowing my whole body toward him. Our hands, our feet. Engraving bodies to bone. His body is so close to mine, I can almost forget him. I am used to getting silent quickly with him. There is no need for me to alter anything now, he is worth the torment. Everything vanished in this moment alone. We lie in each other’s arms.

Lev. You must know, I tell him, heart shaking, when we first enter my room, that I can never see you again. Promise me.

I move my eyes to the cracks in the wall. His head on my thigh. How odd that the sun should be shining and mourning doves singing. Receiving their songs, silver and necessary. The source of light high above this room. The sun’s light down the length of his back. He knows how to love. He has a talent for it. There is a woman on the other side of town who waits for him across this blue distance, in an extravagant hotel room. There is no order to this. It is not possible to love completely and not lose your identity. I have shattered once. I will not do it again.

He watches me dress. I pull on my stockings and sit on the edge of the bed, reach over and touch his scars. New ones. Two on his shoulders. Shining, unknowable. I move toward the window, my hand shading my eyes, his eyes on the line of my body through the thin dress.

I will make it right, he says. Let me.

You don’t understand, I say. He knows how to make anything, I think, but how could anyone fix something like this?

What don’t I understand?

He looks at me, his eyes filling with emotion. He knows everything. He knows nothing.

I foundered. I am just barely back into being. I unclasped my heart. You had every part. What has happened fixes us to this outwardness, to a place where neither of us now are.

All I say is, I am someone else. What I don’t say is that I do not altogether know who I am.

He gets up and walks toward me. I rest my face against his chest. He speaks to me but I do not answer, shaking my head.

Sounds collect below. Here there are electric lights, food, shopping. People at parties. Prostitutes along docks and alleys where the mist rolls in after dark. Filthy men. Crooked agents. Aristocrats gambling at the casinos. Money dwindling at cafés and restaurants from all the waiting. Thin-armed women hollowed out from hunger, hipbones like axeheads. Bribes for tickets to get on the crowded filthy ships. One visa expiring while waiting for another. They are running out of rooms.

Is she an artist? I finally say.

No. A collector.

Good. That will be good for your work.

He takes my face in his hands. None of it matters.

He looks at me. Immemorial. Say something.

Your taxi is here.

He says he will tell the woman that we have seen each other. I imagine her tilting her head when she receives the news. They will speak in low tones. They have their own serious conversations. This thought alone inflicting injury. I make a pact to extinguish any further thoughts of him. Anguish inlaid with intention. We don’t even say goodbye. He just walks out the door and closes it behind him. I marvel at how simple it is. This precise gesture. A door closing. I listen to the sound of him walking down the stairs, slowly growing faint. Abandonment is not enough, I think. You must stay gone.

He will tell me that the woman who has been waiting is pained. She feels ridiculous, like something cancelled. But she offers to buy me a plane ticket, which I think noble, though I say no. Thank you. I will take the ship. Set sail. We will see each other on the other side, he says. And I think, If there is one word for Lev, I know what it would be. It would be survivor.

The light jerks in my eyes. Love makes space. Love takes it away. Though I have witnessed everything going, and too soon, I still feel bound to him. With him, I discovered what people were capable of. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.

Why didn’t you—

I shake my head.

But you could have—

I could never have been anything if I remained with him. Don’t you see? Who wants to be a helper, merely? But I don’t say this. It sounds cold when in fact the opposite is true. He eclipsed everything. I handed myself over to him and he lived in me. I found it almost impossible to do anything in his presence. It occurs to me, only now, what he gave me by not saying he loved me. My solitude. He wanted what was at the heart of me to remain my own. Being with him required all my thinking and loving and force, all the time. Everything I had. It was not pure awe, because somehow it oddly gave me strength. To see into the centre of him and then into the centre of me. But now I think, Why centre?

And after all this time, I say at last, I’m not sure if I never mourned him, or if I’m mourning him still.