Draft Chapter: The Return of Memory

The sorrow arrived without warning—sharp, clean, undeniable. And with it came Susan. I saw her as clearly as if I were still lying in that hotel room in Antibes all those years ago. Her long dark hair fell to the middle of her back, and she was walking away from me toward the bathroom, her body lit by the soft southern light that spilled through the open balcony doors. We had been on the beach earlier that day; I remembered the warmth of the sun, the faint taste of sea salt on the air, the horizon where water dissolved into sky.

From the bed, I had that same view again—the Mediterranean drifting into infinity, the air so light it seemed to move through me, the pale mist touching everything. For a moment, I wasn’t remembering the scene; I was in it. She turned in my mind as if she felt me watching, her face bright, her eyes alive. I remembered telling her I wanted to burn the moment into my memory so I’d never lose it.

For years I actually had lost it. The memory had vanished as if sealed behind glass. When it came back, it came all at once.

I blinked and was somewhere else—our condo in Chicago on a Sunday morning. Thirty-seven floors above the city, sunlight poured through the windows and flooded the kitchen with gold. We wore robes, drank coffee, and read different sections of the Times. She made a soft sound—half contentment, half amusement—and looked up at me over the edge of the paper with a smile that traveled all the way to her eyes. She leaned over to kiss me before sliding back to her stool, the two of us settling again into that easy, unspoken harmony that had carried us through our best years.

I wasn’t prepared for any of this—the vividness, the way my chest tightened, the tears that came quietly. I’d spent so long trying to archive that life, to place it somewhere unreachable, but it refused to stay buried. The pain returned with the clarity of a fresh wound. And yet, in its wake, my mind grew strangely still. My breathing softened. Something inside me opened.

Another memory surfaced—one that felt like a single moment but may have been stitched together from many. We were lying in bed, both aware—though neither willing to say so—that the end was approaching. Even so, we were laughing, easy with one another. There was sorrow present, yes, but joy was the one in the foreground.

She handed me a pamphlet she’d been reading, amused by something in it. I had misunderstood her expression at first; she wanted a playful critique. It reminded me of the way we used to lie around together, trading thoughts, teasing out ideas, letting each other’s minds spark and unfold. That was part of our intimacy too—the intellectual rhythm we shared, the way she could anticipate the turn of my thinking before I reached it myself. It made me feel more alive, more fully formed, as though we completed thoughts the other had only begun.

I made notes on the pamphlet and then, without quite realizing it, I began tracing ideas along her skin as though it were a page—following the curves of her waist, the soft line of her hip. I remembered the warmth beneath my fingertips, the subtle strength in her body, the way her breath deepened. Her presence had always been a kind of sensory abundance; being with her made the world sharper, more dimensional. Her scent, her nearness, the quiet shared awareness between us—those were the rare moments in my life when the boundary between myself and another person dissolved entirely.

It should have lasted. Or at least, it felt then as if it must.

Another image rose: her arm draped across my chest. I lifted her hand to look at it, struck—as I often had been—by the quiet elegance of her wrist. Strong but delicate, unique in a way that was entirely hers. I had loved her whole body, but in that instant it was her wrist that spoke to me, as though it were the hinge between the ordinary and everything I felt for her. Her fingers were long and graceful, her skin warm and firm, its tone simply human—neither this nor that, just alive.

I wasn’t admiring her as an object. I was admiring her as the person who, for a time, had made me feel less fragmented, more whole. She animated me. She made the world feel inhabited rather than observed.

She shifted then, waking slowly, her chin coming to rest just below mine. She opened her eyes, smiled with the kind of unguarded openness that still undoes me, and silently mouthed, I love you. Her hair fell over my face as she leaned in, brushing it back with one hand so the light could reach her eyes. She kissed me then—soft, unhurried—before resting her hand against my cheek.

That was the last memory that surfaced before everything went still again.

And when the stillness came, it came with the realization that I had never fully let her go—nor she, me. I could no longer tell whether I wanted the memories or not, only that they remained, carrying both the ache of loss and the fullness of what we’d experienced together.