Alexandria. I think that’s where we’ll finally meet again. My brown skin caressed with various shades of white, silver gleaming on my fingers and toes, a tattoo travelling the length of my inner thigh, the aftertaste of coffee on my lips, my heart steeped in the colour of dusk, and the memory of you lost somewhere along my bloodstream. 

I will no longer remember the desire drummed up by the touch of your skin against mine but there you’ll be within a few inches of me. In a city that goes back in time, swelling against the indigo waters and baked brown sands, the scent of ancient mariners’ tales wafting through its collective psyche, carrying with it the burden of remembrance and the sighs of a million unlived lives. You will come to me like an inevitable force of nature, disrupting the rhythm of the earth beneath and twisting the sky above into an uneven symphony. You will come to me carrying everything you thought you left behind, absent-minded yet pulsating to the beat of the minutes ticking by. 

The conversation between us will be punctuated with measured silences, like the breakwaters at the port designed to reign in the necessary and clearly demarcate borders. One word out of place, one nuance missed, one unmasked look… could all upset the balance. The elusive balance that we could never strike on that great see-saw of time – the one with its red paint chipping away, rusty and creaking under the weight of folly. And that’s how it always was… me being up when you were down, you went left when I strayed toward the right, she taking you in while I kept him out…

I will ask you nothing and you will tell me only as much as I need to know. You will leave with everything I have ever wanted to say to you – from the first words I swallowed at dusk as we walked side by side along the beach back home, to all the things I spoke into my pillow night after night year after year over the decades that stretched out between us like an elastic band… until the points at which we let go and watched it snapped back into place. Erasing all that space between us and yet taking us further away from each other all the same.

The old sparks will flood our feet like the blue waters under the midnight sky, shimmering and cold all at once. It’s funny how you think about a day and dream of all the things to fill it with it but there is always a sense of incompletion, an ending that eludes you time and again. Is it because you don’t want it to end or because you’re not sure it will ever begin in the first place? I will remind you of all the conversations we had over the years over the seas and across the continents, over all the miles and broken hearts it took to get us to where we were, where we will be on that day. And then for no apparent reason, I will give anything to watch you melt into the ground and go back to the other end of the line so I can no longer be distracted by your face and be mesmerized by your voice instead.

I will remember the only time I sat beside you in that navy blue car with my boxes in the back, and how the longer you took to drive me to the life that was waiting for me, the madder my thoughts got. But for each convoluted crazy thought I had, you rewarded me with stony silences thinly garbed by your interest in my new life then, the one that didn’t include you and which was your own doing. With each question you tried to inch your way back in, pushing with all your might to force open a door that wasn’t even there in the first place. I wanted to scream out loud and tell you what a big fool you were except for the fact that I was distracted by the idea that you still wanted me. It didn’t matter to me then that you didn’t translate that wanting into something more tangible. I was naïve enough to think that it would suffice and carry me across the years, and maybe it did but then we will never really know now, will we?

Why couldn’t you have just said what you wanted to say to me all those years ago instead of making these unwelcome appearances now when I no longer have a heart to give, not to you at least? Why couldn’t I have just cut myself into pieces back when I had more to give, to you at least? So here we are now, caught between my dreams and the mysteries of the universe that always seem to throw us together when we least expect it and pull us apart when we’re anything but ready. But we will meet. In Alexandria. And you will be dressed in yellow and you will lead the way once again. Only this time, I will know where we’re going.