For the time that’s left I will keep this place like a museum to what has passed between the two of us. I will be a little hermit curator moving items from one place to the next until they are exactly as I remember them. I will water the plants and dust the relics. Then I will sell off the things I can, and return the other things to the donors. I will curate no longer.
I don’t know that it is as much me moving to something new and exciting as it is me feeling as if I am moving away from something. Not something altogether bad, just something that I cannot seem to make sense of at such close range.
We talk of not knowing whether we can love anyone else the way we love each other, yet the love we do have between us is not enough to make us want to try again. What a sad lot we are. I know only time heals the wounds, helps us make sense of these conundrums, and I am sure it will eventually all work out for both of us, but even tonight, when I thought I had let it all go, returning from the movie in the park, I see his car once again in front of your house and it sent my spirits straight down the crapper. I could always drive a circuitous route so as not to have to see these things, but I got used to it when the car used to always be there, and now I have gotten used to it not being there, and tonight caught me off guard. I figured he had move somewhere in the neighborhood and just walked over now.
It’s likely I spend too much time wondering what your life is like with him. I get the scant details of you not being completely happy, but I don’t know what that really means. I imagine another mopey boy that you are trying to make happy, much like myself when we lived together. I imagine you dreaming of something more and better, much like you did when you were with me. I want to come and take you away and make it all better, show you that I am better and stronger and all the things you want me to be, but I have read too much self-help at this point to believe that will work.
It’s funny that the movie tonight was Casablanca. Ilsa, Ingrid Bergman, caught between Rick and Victor. One the politically-involved-to-a-fault, world-changing, man to which she is married. The other, the one she is most passionate about, but the one with which it would never really work, yet, the one she would throw it all away for. I felt there was likely something to be learned in the story, but I cannot quite figure out what. I am not sure if I am Victor or Rick in this story, perhaps a little of both, and if I am a little of both the lesson becomes harder to learn. Do I get the girl or not? Does she truly want to be with me? Where does my happiness lie? What is the right thing to do in the situation?
I am still not sure. I am still not sure that Rick and Ilsa didn’t find there way back to each other somewhere down the line, after the war was over. Perhaps they found the country house out West, far away from Casablanca, far away from that tortured past.
All I do know is that Humphrey Bogart puts Ingrid bergman on a plane with her husband at the end, and believes that he did the right thing. He then walks off into the bright fog and toward who knows what. I guess I will be doing the same too soon, but for now I want to keep all these little things around me, to feel as if I am keeping a little piece of you with me for a little while longer.
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