"Rejane's pregnant," I said as soon as I saw him. And as he stepped closer to me, gravity changed, and we were in orbit, encircling one another once again. We spent the night together. He told me that he'd missed me so much that summer that he'd woken up in the middle of the night and put his socks and shoes on was going to knock on my door and tell me that he still loved me, but by the time he was halfway to my house, he turned back. I wondered if in that moment, I was somewhere else, in the bed of another, wishing that it was him breathing next to him. So even if we were worlds apart, we had been connected without ever knowing it.
You'll think this is crazy, but I did then and for a long time after, believe that somewhere, in some alternate universe, that Kate, and the boy who loved her, the ones that don't live on earth anymore, not in the flesh anyway, just in their slowly fading memories, are together and will love each other, with a force and profundity most people never know for the rest of their days. But I was young then, so much younger than I am now, and I didn't know then that something could be untrue even if you really believed it.
I started crying harder.
"Why aren't you sadder?" I asked him.
"I am sad, Kate. I just don't know how to show it."
"When you leave, this is really it. We are really over, and there is no going back."
I wouldn't have believed it then but I was right. He left that night and the boy I loved never came back. I think in some ways, I am still making peace with it. And by writing this essay, I am still saying goodbye.
In Raymond Chandler’s novel, The Long Goodbye, his famed hardened detective Phillip Marlowe says when his lover leaves, “There was a lump of lead in the pit of my stomach. The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right.
To say goodbye is to die a little.”
That night, I died a little.
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