I put a small wooden box on the table. I carried it with both hands. It seems to settle with a heaviness that belies its simple pale wood. It has no ornamentation save the life of the tree that bled into its flesh, once, when it, too, reached for the sky.
Your hand in mine, I lead you to the table and sit down with you. I don’t let go. My thumb runs across the back of your hand. A bird complains in the tree that overhangs the garden, and a gentle breeze would carry our minds away to endless fields of green if we let it. But I hold your hand, and I look into your beautiful grey eyes.
“Listen,” I start. And stop. I try again.
“In this box is everything…”
“Everything?” you ask quizzically. Your lips hint at a smile. You’re teasing me. If my heart weren’t in that box it would leap into my throat right now.
“Everything that’s me.”
I’m too earnest for my own good. But you look at the box.
Smash it, break it, burn it and let it end right here.
I move your hand to rest on the lid. Then I let go. My throat is so full.
“What do you want me to do with it?”
I stare at you. I don’t want to understand your question.
I shrug.
“I don’t really know. I just know it belongs to you.”
You look back at me. Your hand hasn’t moved, but your eyes have. In those eyes you are already a million miles away.
“You shouldn’t do that, you know?”
I know you’re being gentle with me. I know it’s because you care about me. Your hands cradle the box, as if you could somehow stop me. Protect me from doing this. How my joy would sing if I hadn’t tucked it into that box for you to keep.
I put one hand over top of yours. Our eyes meet, grey and green. What a picture we make, sitting here in the shadow of a bright and beautiful sunlight, serenaded by discordant birdsong. Would that moments could last lifetimes.
“I know. But it was done a while ago, and now I can’t undo it. It just is.”
You don’t know it, but you don’t have to run. I cannot now make you see the depth of my understanding, but I understand. My pain for the fact that you’ll never know that is one of the few things I didn’t put in the box.
“I…”
I shake my head. You don’t have to keep disagreeing. I take your hand and I kiss the back of it. For that moment when my lips brush your skin, I think we both see it. A version of us sitting in the sun, only a little way away. Another version, standing with my arms around you, by the pond. Two of us, having breakfast by the kitchen table behind the window. We see them all.
Maybe they see us, too. Maybe, for a moment, it’s all true.
“I’m sorry. It’s yours, and now I have to go.”
I’m several paces away and I can’t turn back.
“You can tuck it away in the attic.”
And without looking, I know that I’ll live only in the dust that settles on it.