On Going — Split Lip Magazine

Where the roads meet at the top of the hill and you can see farmland stretch as far as the city lights, I become intimate with everything I’ll never know. My house sits a mile south with three empty beer bottles at the kitchen sink. I once was so many things: June street corners and cigarettes and bare feet in creek water. The wrought-iron smell of fire escape talks, the nickname you gave me over cheese fries at the local diner. Along Main Street, I pass the preserved log cabin with its splintered plank walls and caving ceiling and consider the fact of decay, how far you’ve traveled since the last time we were together in that empty room with the yellow raincoat on the floor. I wore the baby blue sweatshirt with the tear at the cuff that once was my mother’s, and you whispered the way you wished it would be and then you left. Toward the end, we climbed craggy seaside cliffs in that coastal town and stared out at the lighthouse across all that dark water, consumed by what we couldn’t see, like in that retro motel room years later when I threaded my fingers through the black strands above your temples and wanted you to kiss me and you swore you touched your lips to my neck—at least this—but I can’t recall it, and so here I am left longing even for the memory of the thing. We lose everything we love. Still, the routine of the red mail truck outside my window every day. Overhead, even the birds are circling something.

Dina L. Relles’ work has appeared in The Atlantic, DIAGRAM, Wigleaf, Passages North, and elsewhere. She’s the nonfiction editor at Pidgeonholes. More at dinarelles.com or @DinaLRelles.