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It’s hard to say where I’d fallen in love with Lidiya, exactly. But I know of all the places that I’d least wanted to return to, to revisit the ghosts of the past, Mexico was the one that came to mind first.
“You’d want me to help.” I lay on my back, looking up at the ceiling as I tip the glass of vodka to my lips, an old familiar ache filling me at the memory of her. “You’re the reason I keep doing this. I see you, always. Needing me.”
Blonde hair and blue eyes. A laugh that could lift a man’s spirits in the worst of times, a sharp wit and a sharper attitude. Words that could cut to the bone, or ripple like silk over skin. Desire so strong it hurt.
Happiness and grief, in equal measure.
I know it’s been too long for me to still talk to her aloud like this, in the dark silence of the night. Too often, I make sure that there’s someone else in the bed with me, so that I don’t have to remember. So that there’s no silence to fill.
So that I can pretend that I’m a young man again, before I met her. So I can imagine that all of that is still yet to come.
All of the love, and all of the pain. A pain so strong that sometimes, I wonder if I might have never done it at all, if I’d known how much it would hurt.
And then I remember her, every moment–on white hotel sheets and crisp golden sand, on a moonlit Tokyo night with drops of water from the onsen clinging to her skin, and I know I’d do it all again, no matter how much it broke me.
No matter how clearly it divided my life in two–into the man I was before Lidiya Petrovna, and who I was after.
