random act of bravery

Once I raced to you across the hot asphalt at a gas station in central Saskatchewan. You watched me coming across the miles of flat, an expanse so extreme you elbowed me awake in glee once we hit Alberta: "Mountains! Mountains!" When I remember it I am running so fast, so hard, for longer than I've ever run before, and you are waiting beside the car, your mouth breaking into a smile, your arms reaching to meet me, and I think: I could run like this forever, if you were there to catch me.

And then the New Hampshire summer, low and heavy against my shoulders, the air like the surface of water just waiting to be broken. I am sitting on your front stoop and I am scared of your mother still, because this was before she gave me your great grandmother's navy silk dress, before she took me out barefoot in her garden to show me the palm-sized caterpillars, before I heard the scratchy recording of her alone on a stage with her guitar and a folk song, before we loved each other. I am sitting on your front stoop and willing every car that drives by to be yours, home from work, your sweat-soaked t-shirt in the back of the car, your 19-year-old body still soft but dark and mine, and I listen to the mosquitos and the storm-hungry cicadas and I wait and wait and wait and I think: I could wait like this forever, if I knew you would one day come back.

Today I called it quits. And it broke my heart, it did, to look at you and see you so far away from me, the distance between us growing. But it stoked something too, something flinty and real, the knowledge that so much of the eight years we spent together was me carving out space for you to fit into, running at you, bringing you closer, willing you to come home - to me, to yourself. You have so much work to do, and that is yours, and I cannot mend you, and I no longer want to. To look you in the eyes and to say it: that was brave. To say goodbye: that was brave.