HOLLY ANHOLT

Nils

ONCE I BEGAN TO MOURN, I mourned a lot. In my case anyway, mourning meant unlocking the loss from my mind, where it had sat like an urn on a mantel, always in plain view but never mentioned, almost from the time I was born. To me, mourning came to mean being here but also being there. It meant being without the Other, but also with the Other. Love was the engine of grief.

Unlocking love, unlocking grief. Unlocking grief, unlocking love.

I spent days in my room. I read various poets who’ll go nameless. I packed. I watched TV. I spoke little to anyone. I forgot caring about who it was who betrayed my parents, or even if whoever it was was dead or alive. I caught a summer cold, and finally I rested.

And before I left, I called Nils. Funny the rules you make up for yourself when an affair is over, like I couldn’t see Nils again but I could call him. I could always call him.

Or could I? I was so tongue-tied on the phone. I barely got my story out. He was a good sport about it all. This and that. He proposed some herbal thing for my cold that David swore by. And then: “I think it’s a good thing…what happened to you.”

“In the bunker.”

“If it had happened before…I don’t know…I guess it couldn’t have happened before.”

It was only then I remembered what I’d called him to say. I began to tremble again, the way I’d trembled in recent days, the way you might if you were carrying something you imagined of unusual value and became afraid, just for that reason, that you would drop it. I wished I could find, for just a moment, the unblinking grayness of his eyes, the color of the sea. “You know, if you don’t mourn, if you can’t mourn…I don’t think you can know what it is that needs to be forgiven. Not fully, anyway. Not with a full heart… You may know who to forgive, or who not to, but you don’t know the full loss…”

“Forgiven?” he said in the phone, and it sounded a little echo-y and hollowed out.

“It was what you needed from me, wasn’t it?”

I felt I heard his shrug in the phone, I felt I saw the denial in his eyes.

“Then…then…Nils, I forgive you. For everything, for whatever…But mostly for everything you never did but think you’re responsible for anyway… Your life is so hard. You’re so hard on yourself.”

Now he laughed. “Of course I’m not,” he continued to laugh.

Then I kissed the receiver, and I believe I heard the sound, though I cannot tell you what such a sound would be, of his lips touching the plastic receiver at the other end of our connection.

Good-bye, Nils.