It's for you, Beeb.

Back then, we were living on the southern coast of Oregon, just outside of town. We posed as an engaged couple so we could rent the house; we posed as engaged to avoid the ire of the conservative retirement community. In fact, we were living in sin, I suppose. As with the original sin, it ended in banishment. But at the time, it felt so adult, and I felt so nested there. In retrospect, how young we were! It seems silly that it all felt so very important, permanent. Now, years later, I haven’t gone far. He, however, rocketed off and alighted 400 miles away, in a life completely foreign to me. We were so happy then, how dare he be happier now!

While I can clearly remember the nauseating emptiness when I returned to the house after being away to find him gone, gone, gone, that’s not what I remember most. I remember more clearly picking dandelions, building the garden, burying the baby chicken that didn’t make it (in the rain, under the big rock). I can still smell the sickly new-carpet fumes, which were neatly covered up by my sugar-fire accident. That Christmas when we made all those damn presents for everyone, the Moroccan dinner party. Him, repairing books on the pneumatic desk that was too heavy for me to remove after he left. Developing pictures in the laundry room. Walking across the river bridge into town. For some reason, what I remember best is the good stuff. That’s what makes remembering so sad.

The end of the year, the season of reckoning, is fast approaching, and I am half-way through my twenty-ninth year. I’m trying to accept that I am not the woman I thought I’d be, and sometimes recently I wonder if I left her up there in Oregon. She’s living out the life I was meant to have, and I’m cold and damp here by the ocean, huddled next to the heater and dreaming that we’ll cross paths again.