Forever Gone

Forever Gone: A Response to John Edgar Wideman’s Short Story, "Lost and Found"

She knows he’s watching her. With those sea-green eyes that watched her so long ago. Or so it feels. She wonders if he knows that she’s seeing him see her, through this window like the ancient one that enclosed their many secrets, their many nights. Like the many nights she knew he was watching her in bed, accidently awakened by his dreams, unaware of her ability to feel him without actually feeling him, as he listened to her closely as she flipped through magazines. She knew the day would come eventually, so she kept herself busy. She kept herself awake and conscious of fate. Nothing she really believed in until the day she met him, on the train that rode over the East River to Brooklyn, and saw for the first time what it meant to be struck by lightning, to feel cupid strike her with loving someone else who perfectly fit her imperfections perfectly.

She yearned for this desirable feeling of him to consume her for the rest of her life, the rest of her days with him since that moment. But the day came when it just wasn’t there anymore. There was no longer a part of her making him, and him in her, ferociously growing into this fast-paced cycle of nothing, certainly nothing strong enough to keep her wanting him. There was nothing special to her anymore, nothing worth waking up to every morning and being joyful about or maybe even angry just to make-up eventually, into some happy fairytale that really doesn’t make sense until the ending comes along, unintentional and surprising, this ending that is often desired but never realistic enough to cross her mind, never really realistic to him enough to stay with like he said he would, not verbally but with the way he looked at her like everything was alright, touched her like it was the first time, and yet she knew from those actions that those feelings were no longer for her. But there was nothing, nothing in her could make her second guess how wrong it was to be with him. Nothing left for her to love. And yet she did. She loved him more in ways she could fathom. She loved him in ways that didn’t consist of love, but of undefined things, like the clustered stars surrounding uneven planets, the very things that people know exists, but fail to grasp why or how they’re there.

Those nights she stayed up waiting to feel the emptiness scream within her walls. She resisted smelling the sweet, sour smell of cheap perfume on the sheets that she didn’t own herself. She resisted the thought of cheap lipstick staining work clothes of the man she loved, the man she once knew. She let those thoughts get the best of her. Once, just to feel him near her made her feel comfortable, as he dreamed silently through the night, and she listened to the heart that would one day stop beating for her. It stopped. She could no longer hear the magic beneath his chest, but could somehow hear his beat after he left when it was miles away, while she was underneath the new scent of a man not hers. And she still insists on keeping busy to keep her mind off of the emptiness until the old him comes once again, staring at her, imagining what could have been. She feels him watching her four stories below. Just like old times and everything’s alright. But she can’t love him again, for fear of getting lost in the absence she felt the day he left. The day he left to follow that cheap fragrance and those lip stains that were never hers, could never be hers. She could not go back to those nights, those days she could not sleep scared that he would one day dream of someone else.