. . .

““What do you want to do, David? Who do you want to be, once we get home?” I can’t get my head around what she’s saying. Who do I want to be? Like I’m just going to walk back into life with a new haircut and a tie and transform myself into a, a, a primary school teacher? A lawyer, a barista, a functioning member of society? After all of this? After Eskew? The truth is, I want to be nobody. As Allegra gives up and shifts her entire body away from me in her seat, taking an apparently firm interest in the trails of cloud passing through the darkness beneath the window of the plane, I think that to myself. If I get out of Eskew, I want to be nobody. A whisper of wings on the water. A rope hammock, creaking in the porch. No more than that. No memories, no dreams. Just the faintest trail of pure sensation, winding its way through existence. No other people. No ambitions, no hobbies. Life without detail, or reflection, or anything approaching conscious thought. It’s the only way to be certain, if I want to hold Eskew at bay. And even then, it might not be enough, because like a deer or a hare or any other small preyed-upon beast that has been bred over the centuries to know fear, no matter how empty my thoughts are, I will always be watching for it, eyes wild, hair on end, watching for the signs of it, for— —a movement in the water. —a shadow upon the porch. “You’re frightened,” Allegra says, suddenly. “You’re frightened you might never be rid of it.””

He asked me when I fell in love with him and I knew it sounded dramatic to say the moment I saw him, so I told him this story of my grandma who had Alzheimer's- she forgot her name and the words for fruit and food, she forgot her address and how to use the washroom, all her life lost to the disease. The only thing she remembered was her son's name and when that began to fade, the one thing she always remembered was that she loved him, even in illness, even in insanity. She saw this 6 foot 2 man with a scrubby beard and she didn't know him but she said she trusted him, she asked him to hold her hand when she died. When does memory end and love begin? All I know is- she loved him before she remembered him.

Do you understand? When I am done telling you these stories, when you’re done listening to these stories, I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. In this afternoon we briefly merged into one. After this, you will always carry a bit of me, and I will always carry a bit of you, even if we both forget this conversation.