For Emily Whenever I May Find Her

    A gift, they called it, but would I have returned it unopened if I had known? I like to think I am better than that. The gift I give to you is untied.

#

       On the first day we met, you bought me coffee from a machine; so hot it scalded my fingers. My last coin had fallen from my aching, icy hand, rolled along the ground, and was under my supervisor's desk. She stared at me, daring me to crawl on my hands and knees, my skirt hitched up, to find it; tapping her pencil on the desk to a tune she heard only in her head. Why did she look so long at the green jade ring I inherited from my mother?  I remember when my body was a spring sapling, toned and tall. Hers was old and sagging, like a tree bearing autumn's withered fruit. I watched her when she was not looking; something drawing me to her, but tentative and out of reach. When I tried to speak she was waspish, cankered like the fruit. 

       With a Billie Eilish pout that belied your goodness, you were twenty-three, a vision of heaven in denim shorts: was it wrong of me to lose my heart; to hear cathedral bells? Twenty years stood between us but you said you didn't care. We ran together, laughing, holding hands. You were the light I craved. I pressed strawberries against your lips; we drank champagne and took hot scented baths, fussed dogs we passed in the street, and cried at weddings. I knew, just knew without question, that one wedding would be ours and your tears would be mine; everything tasting as sweet as the strawberries. Until it wasn't.

       “Lucia, it’s snowing, look.”

       But the snow was grey and the caustic burned the air in our lungs. 

#     

       The conflict surprised us when we turned our backs. We survived the pandemic and started to rebuild. If we’d not returned to our offices, we never would have met, you said. And you held my heart and squeezed it with your words of gratitude for the coin I dropped. Then the poison came, and bombs fell, leaving this gaping, gasping chasm I sought to fill for seventeen years. When the fighting stopped, they filled mass graves with second sons and daughters, the first ones already lost forever after the vaporising gases dispersed. The land clearing began; towering ruins demolished, wiped away like memories of a terrible hangover, laughed about by boys in ill-fitting uniforms; a war denied by the perpetrators, burners of books, turned benefactors there for our salvation. And you were dead, and I forgot how to live.

#

       ‘Put your past behind you. Embrace the light.’

      I ripped the card in two, in four, in a dust cloud of pieces. Seventeen years without faith or reason burned my fingers. But the invitation returned, with a key.

       ‘Save the one you love. Free your soul.’

       The persistence of memory tore my heart: my soul already lost.

# 

       We faced the three walls of the box, never looking at each other, not speaking of our needs since our first introduction a year before, Adrian, Martha, and me. We met in the desolate, preserved ruin of our city, in the shadow of broken shards left behind to remind us, clutching the keys and blue embossed invitations. 

       Martha was researching the cause of the war, her eyesight that of a grey-skinned mole. She shrieked like the mole in the claws of an owl whenever the battery of her tablet failed. Would anyone read her epic work and learn from the warning of the past? I needed to find you before she laid down the stylus for the last time.

       Adrian was softer and kinder. Young and idealistic. Noble, but unnecessary, I thought, for a time. He was a child when the war began. He returned to bring food to the starving underground dogs. The parcel of food affected the weight of the box, and each time he selected a trophy to take home to compensate. 

       “What do you do with this tainted street debris? Why not bring back one of the dogs instead?”

        He made artwork from the junk and was allergic, he said, to the dogs' fur. 

       "Who buys your art?"

       "He gives it away; it brings him joy." Martha said.

       It was always cold in the box, even in the height of summer when the corn ate the sun and ripened to the gold of your hair. The hair that spread across my pillow like embroiderers thread, soft, silken, and sewing memories in my bed. I came unstitched when I lost you. 

       The box became a prison, but I knew I must continue. I feared the falling, tumbling, painful echoes of the past, the clock ticking, but I could not leave it alone, like a weeping sore. Eight hours was all I had before returning empty-handed. A week passed, and I tried again. I kept searching, running, breath held tight, racing idle corridors, ill-lit, stale-scented stairwells, listening to silent voices, none of them yours. Staring into the faces of intimate strangers, frozen in time, tracing lines until my fingers bled out their aching emptiness. Looking in the darkest places you would never go, but that I inhabited, with slinking stealth on footsteps that jarred my soul. 

       Staying behind in the darkness, in the ordure of my own stinking misery the others found me, insisting I return to the box. They told me not to give up hope; I would find you and make you safe. Their blind confidence, no better than the war-mongers. They didn’t know when I found you, I would have to choose which one I would force to stay behind so you could return with me. 

       We were unlikely companions but no longer speculated on the identity of our benefactor. Three blue cards, three keys, and a box only we could see. It was a distraction from my grief. In time it felt like a trap.

#

       The box never took us to the days when you and I breathed the same air. I needed to set the date, but Martha refused to pay the price, and all I could do was accept the random programming and hope. This was, after all, a gift. Instead, it sent us to Martha's graduation, a day she spent with her professors, whispering secrets; to Adrian’s school, where she met with his teachers. Days that were meaningless to me.

       #

       It was too soon when we arrived, five days before our first encounter. I could not steal you away when you did not know me. No promises that we were, and would again be lovers, friends, toe-dipping shell-seekers; no pledge that I was aware of your fear of flying or your love of retro, daisy-pattern tee-shirts, would convince you to run from your life. With your twenty-three-year-old self-assurance, you would deny me everything. If I stayed, I would also strand the others in the past. They needed three heartbeats to run the machine, and I could not watch you die again. But my heart beat with less certainty as I waited outside the box for Adrian and Martha to arrive because I saw you, and you were twenty-three, and my mirror did not lie.

#

       Once, the box took us into the future, to the day Adrian's son was baptised, a day that should not have been, but was; and would be again. My heart plummeted, free-falling, as though in an empty lift shaft when I saw the mother of his child. He named the boy Luca - bringer of light, and the light dawned in my eyes for the first time in seventeen years. How could I have been so blind? 

       “Emily.” A name dragged from my lips.

       Adrian guessed the link between us. We looked on; his tenderness toward his wife and the tight grip of tiny fingers was a lesson in love I had forgotten. I wanted you, for me.        

#

       Martha inveigled her way into a government think-tank. Adrian met a girl at the animal shelter; he did not need to tell me her name. They were vocal and excited. I’d not seen them like that before. The timeline suited them, they said, and they would pay to set a date for our next return. For once I thought I played the better cards. My one-third would determine the date. It would be our last return.

#

      No one noticed me assume the role of watcher; a sagging woman whose only brightness, a jade ring, jarred against the grey of age. I hid my hands, sensing around me the familiarity of powdered coffee, the faded blue carpet tiles, and artificial pot plants of an office soon to be rubble, a graveyard whose markers were the fused grey steel cabinets I’d not seen for seventeen years. You were wearing a tee shirt in Mary Quant colours I bought from a vintage store. My fingernails cut crescent moon scars on my palm as I squeezed my hands, yin and yang, beneath the desk as I saw my younger self with you. There was a coin under the desk where I sat but I did not move it; would not let it be disturbed. It had played its role.

#

       Your companion didn’t know me, I couldn’t allow that, but I knew she would forgive me, in time, because she and I are one, and we were guided by love. 

#

       We first met seventeen years ago. You and I met eighteen days ago. Later we will meet again, and you will struggle to recognise me. But I came prepared, with photographs of us, of me over the seventeen years I’ve aged, of your collection of Simon and Garfunkel vinyl that I play when the maudlin mood overwhelms me; of your gravestone. And a picture of your son that I will show you only as a last resort. I’m waiting in the office where we met and at a desk where I do not look out of place. I wear my mother's jade ring for luck and a perfume that reminds me of autumn fruit. And then you are there by the coffee machine, and I am ready, tapping a pencil on the desk with gentle determination to a tune that bears your name, Emily, and the lyrics run through my head;

       I kissed your honey hair, with my grateful tears,

       Oh, I love you girl, oh, I love you.

       My darling, you will not have the memories that we made, but I could never forget them.

#

       Soon there will be an eclipse, and the sky will darken. The gas will settle, and the bombs will drop. You are in the box heading to a new future with Adrian, who met you less than a month ago, but already loves you: and Martha, who will write a chapter in her book about Lucia, a woman who was a supervisor in an office, but who received the gift of time and forgot how to be bitter.

The End