salt & string

memory as wish-making

Every time I think of you, I make a wish.

I send forth some silent sentiment of goodwill, or abundance, or bliss.

Stirring scrambled eggs in the morning, I can only hope you’re eating well. Squeezing a lime into my Corona, I can only cheers to your good health.

Only occasionally am I selfish, and does my message sound more like a plea. Rarely do I slip into the self-indulgence of my grief. Sickly sweet as it is…

Wandering the shoreline wondering if you still dream of me, bargaining with the memory of you as if it’s still connected to reality, begging you telepathically: please don’t erase me.

In Granada, I watch an old man strumming his guitar with the utmost devotion and diligence. The plaza he is playing in is next to empty: hardly any bodies interrupt his acoustics. He is at the center, warmly lit by the lights illuminating the cathedral behind him. Sat strumming before a romantic backdrop that he doesn’t even seem to notice.

He plays for no one but himself.

I can tell.

The look on his face reminds me of a trance state I've seen before. The gaze he holds looks a lot like yours when you’re at the piano, lost in the intimacy of instrumentation. His hands dance as if they aren’t callousing, fingers nimble and submissive to the chords he obeys. His face remains supple, focused, painted with grace. Nothing he does is clumsy, no noise he makes is strained.

The music he makes is the only salient figure in the world to him in this moment.

All else dissolves…including me.

I make a silent prayer in that moment. Whisper the wish that you’ll end up like this man one day. That you will sit somewhere in the world someday, in public or alone, still engaged in your own iteration of this beautiful sorcery. That you will never fall out of practice of that string instrument magic. The one you used to practice before me.

Regardless of whether or not you notice me watching, all I want is for you to stay connected to it: the music. If not ours, anymore, then this love—at least.

I will always be listening, as invisible as I need to be—as I am now, unseen by this other face.

by Ashleigh Brilliant

I repeat the message again in Málaga, as I speak to you out loud. Talking through the sea breeze. I write sentences in the sand, pretending that there might be a real chance that you’ll receive them on the other side of the pond. That the words will wash up along the shore of the Thames; arrive at your feet on the way to work; reflect onto the skyline, or something.

The salt on my skin is sticky; tears trickle down my cheeks. I wander along the shore, collecting shells, coming to terms with this terrible clarity: the beauty that lies ahead of me as company to my melancholy.

The loss of you weighs lighter than it once did, but I'd be lying if I said the thought of you has become infrequent.

I look at the water weightlessly lapping on the shore, and all I want to do is call you. For you to hear the background noise and ask me where I am in the world. To make a romantic joke about joining me. To ask how the family trip is going. To remind me how we fell in love over the phone in Italy the last time I went away with them.

I know better, however. Acutely aware that it’s just one of those days: the kind where your name will ring incessant in my head.

I’ve noticed, more than anything, that I tend to remember you out of habit. Your face takes shape in my imagination as an unconscious practice. Your name arrives intrusively in my mind, paired up with some song or semantic association.

Really, it is likely your name has just become part of a pattern. One that will eventually break; fall away; lose weight. Recurrence as replay. Something trained. Which is to say, it is able to be reshaped.

It’s best not to act when I’m in this state.

There are just so many things I want to tell you all the time—so many insights that came too late, thank-yous I never got to say, things that I didn’t recognize until later, or never had the foresight to explain.

I’d love to sit across from you someday and tell you how much your passion made an impression on me. How this, in turn, has come to influence others in my life—who now say my own has left them inspired, invigorated, changed.

But in the meantime, I measure my tenderness. I think of my thinking of you not as a resurgence of heartbreak, but as a chance for something more forgiving. I carry your memory as part of my identity, as living proof that what we had was more real than I could ever describe. That it was rapture and revolution and despite the hole in my heart I made it out more alive than ever.

Missing you is simply another disorienting state of being: something that seizes my body as if I’m drunk or dizzy. A feeling that makes futile attempts to anchor itself in a sensory realm that is no longer accessible, find presence in a face that hasn’t been seen in front of me in almost a year now.

It petitions the one wish I wouldn’t dare make: to will the past into Today.