Once More to the Station

We sit at the kitchen table, caught in the lull of conversation. Too early for lunch, too late for breakfast, he rests his head in his hand as he tilts his coffee cup to watch the milk’s foam collect on its walls. I study him, his focus not on me or the cup but turned inward, noting how his eyebrows raise when he inhales, but just barely. I knew that, once, years ago, but miles apart for months at end have blurred these specific traits for me, half-erasing memories like water on fountain pen. I had missed him, and dreamt of this for seemingly time eternal, but he has changed—I have changed—and today is not what I imagined in my many, intricately detailed, daydreams. He looks up from the cup, meets my eyes. His green flecked with brown, mine a dull blue. He almost seems mournful, as if he lost something intangibly irreplaceable, and I suppose I, too, feel that way.

“Cal,” he says, letting the coffee cup come to a stop. Now stationary, the frothed bubbles begin to pull apart, and the coffee begins to flatten. “I missed you. A lot.” So did I, you idiot. “Christ, I missed you so much my heart hurt.”

“I missed you too.” I missed him so much my world greyed like the hairs at my temples, so much my life became a series of filler moments between the times we spoke on the phone. I missed him like flowers miss the sun at night, like owls miss the moon in the day. This, however, is not what I missed. “But you’re not staying.” He can’t stay. Not like this, not with our lives twisted and wrenched apart by fate and work and family and forced back together by train tickets and half-packed suitcases.

“Cal, I can’t. You know that.” I do know that. I also know what he says next, “I love you. I love my job. I can’t leave it behind.” Not for me, his supposed love. I understand. I’m just a man, and he is a god, a titan of industry, a mythical creator of trends inhabiting a glass-walled office in an impossibly tall building in a city of skyscrapers. I am mousy, cute, and directionless.

“I know.” He can’t. Too much a sacrifice for me. I can’t blame him. “I love you too.” I do, desperately, hopelessly, endlessly, so deeply and completely without him I can never feel whole. Yet now, in his presence, I am still missing something.

“I don’t think we’re in love anymore,” he says, suddenly small, suddenly human. I don’t either. I love him, yes, but there is one jigsaw piece that no longer fits in its slot, and I know it never will again.

“I know,” I reply, almost silently. I love him; and somehow, at the same time, I bristle towards him, on guard, defensive. Not myself. He turns his attention to his left ring finger, where the ring I gave him nestles into a worn callus years too old. Tugs at it lightly until it slides off, almost too easily, as if he had practiced before. He slides it across the table to me, and waits until I take it. A reversal of what I had enacted myself all those year ago, when we were happy and inseparable and in love. It is cold in my hands, smooth on the inside and nicked from wear on the outside. A gift I know we will never exchange again.

“I’m sorry,” he says, still small and meek. He collects himself and pushes back from the table, meeting my eyes once more before they dart away. “I’m going to go back to Toronto.” I nod. “Millie will pick me up in a bit.” He had planned. Arranged a ride to the train station. Always thoughtful. He is at the door to what was once our bedroom now, and almost turns back to say something; but, he doesn’t, and picks up his too-small overnight bag, still packed, from beside the bed. He walks past me to the front door and I breathe in his scent one last time; dull like copper, sharp like spearmint gum. “I love you. I really do, Cal.”

I turn over the ring in my hands. Pull my own off, let the bands clink together in my palm as they catch the light from the kitchen window. “I love you too.”

And he is gone.