She sat alone in this room, which smelled of old coffee and beer. Her foot bobbed nervously as the fluorescent lightsflick-flick-flickeredoverhead, humming loudly. The Perennials hadn’t arrived yet, but they were notorious for getting onstage late.
Emeline closed her eyes and breathed it all in: her name on the Nymph’s marquee, a fourteen-city tour, and (hopefully) a new record deal with a major recording studio. After everything—after grinding out cover songs in dingy bars until 2:00 am, after being perpetually on the road unsure if she could afford her next tank of gas, after busking in the street to make ends meet—here she was. Making it.
And if The Perennials weren’t the people she thought they were, so what? It didn’t matter.Thismattered. She was about to go out onstage at the Nymph—a stage where so many of her favorite bands had played before her—and sing before a sold-out show of three hundred people.
She reached into her bag, looking for her phone, wanting to know how much longer she had before needing to be out there. Her fingers brushed something stiff and papery: the slender spine of a book. She pulled it out.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
The cover was red as blood against her black dress.
Emeline was about to shove it right back in when a folded piece of paper fell out from between its pages.
She stared at the folded note, her heart thundering in her chest. Summoning her courage, she picked it up, unfolded the paper, and found a message scrawled in pencil down the lined page, difficult to read in parts from where the graphite was smudged and faded.
Emeline,
If you’re reading this, it’s because I’ve finally worked up the courage to tell you the truth, or you’ve figured it out for yourself. I dearly hope it’s the former.
I’ve tried writing this letter a hundred times, and each time, the words are inadequate. What I’ve done is unforgivable and any apology insufficient, but please know that I never meant to cause you pain, only to save you from it. I realize there’s no way to undo what I’ve done, and no going back to who we once were, but if there were some way to atone, some price I could pay to begin to heal the harm I’ve caused, trust me: I would pay it.
There’s a poem in this book that I never understood until you left. Now I understand it all too well.
Hawthorne
Emeline’s heart flickered in time with the lights.
She glanced to the book of poetry, where the note had beenhidden. One of the pages was dog-eared to mark its importance. Reaching for it, she opened to the page and found a poem staring up at her.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines,it began.
She kept reading.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
Emeline’s pulse thudded hard in her throat.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
She continued on, drinking in the sorrowful words, until one little line made the world go still:
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
They hit her with a dizzying force, those words. The book slipped from her fingers and fell to her lap.
“‘Forgetting Is So Long.’”
It was the name of the locked folder on her Elegy app. The one that contained her old songs.
What if the password is part of the poem?
Emeline grabbed her bag and dug deep. Down at the bottom, her fingers closed around her phone. She drew it out and quickly opened Elegy. A notification popped up.
You haven’t accessed FORGETTING IS SO LONG in 553 days. Do you want to delete?
She hit NO. Then tapped the folder.
This folder is password protected,a new notification read.Enter the password now.
