September came quickly once she was taken away with the summer wind and I was left with the dust and settling of suicidal leaves by my feet. Like a song from long ago, everything she’d ever said, sung around my head but only every other word I could remember. “My winter, my wind, welcome loneliness home again.” I hummed dramatically as I placed my hand over my heart and tried to make it stop beating with my mind. It didn’t work.

The heavy paced city moved around me, reinforcing the irrelevancy I already felt not worthy of. Do we not feel heartbreak as if its the first time, every time it blows across our souls? “Oh, but please baby please, don’t let me go.” I sang softly as I walked against the wind and up towards the hill while the dead leaves leached on to my feet as the fall sky fell into the dark night and winter took over the world. She kept away. She kept deep down into her own world that I was no longer apart of. But isn’t that just it? Isn’t that how it goes? “So it goes, never so low, so long to the hero,” Played from a radio as I walked around the library in the main part of town pretending to look for something I knew I’d never find. The bright lights and pine drenched over everything. I was after her, but all I could find was her ghost.

“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone.” She asked cuddling her body tighter onto the chair, bringing her knees up to her chest. “I think Linda is the ugliest name ever invented,” I said as I caressed her forearm, feeling the tiny hairs against my fingertips as I misread every word in front of me, unable to concentrate. “Isn’t that your mom’s name?” She gasped laughing, tilting her head back laughing so hard that I thought she was going to fall off the old library chair that made a squeak every time she moved her body to a more comfortable position. “That’s why I never told anyone,” I said smirking, pretending to be so cool. I pretended to be so deep into those words I couldn’t read because all I could do was think of the excitement that filled my soul knowing that the next time I looked up I would see her there smiling in front of me.

“and the worst kind aren’t the ones who spell it, L I N D A, no no,” I said closing the book slowly, and repositioning my body closer to her as I spilled out my secret carefully by her ear, “no, no, it’s the ones who spell it L Y N D A.” I shook my head in disappointment as she smiled again moving her head closer into my space. She paused for a moment and turned her head slightly to the right thinking about this. “Wait, isn’t your moms named Lynda, spelled with a Y.” I shook my head slowly with my eyes closed as if I was about to receive a blow to the chin. She began to laugh again and this time the soft giggles turned into a roaring rebuttal to the thing I had never told anyone before. She pulled me in closer, so close that I could smell her perfume, her skin, I could smell the way she spoke and the way she felt about it. “Don’t you worry my sweet. Your secret is safe with me,” She pulled me closer and kissed my lips.

I walked around the library enough times to memorize the sections and started to feel saddened but the unnecessary amount of books that were in the library considering how electronic books have taken away the need for libraries. I shook my head and jammed my hands in my pockets as I walked out into the freezing cold. She hated those electronic books, those tablets.

“I can’t believe we’ve come to this.” She said shaking her head as her forehead tightened and her lips pursed together. “I can’t believe we’ve progressed to the point of losing ourselves in the process.” She would take out a book from the shelf and touch it so intimately that I would feel a jealous jab run through me. I wanted to be the book, extend my skin across its cover and bend myself in-between the binding.

Maybe that was it. Maybe I just wanted too much. Maybe she got sick of feeling my wanting instead of receiving my giving. Or maybe I took so much from her that she had nothing left for herself. Towards the end, her once warm embrace had vanished leaving behind a cold, unrecognizable environment. We stopped going to the library.

“We’ve been there so many times,” she would say, “Why don’t we go somewhere else for a change?” Somewhere else? I couldn’t think of anywhere else that meant so much, that felt so sacred and special between us both. Then the letters kept coming in. The ones who welcomed her to places far from where we stood and the more that came, the farther away she began to feel. “We have to talk about this, we can’t pretend like summer isn’t ending.” She said so quickly as if she’d just ran a mile and had no breath left to spare. Her mind was elsewhere, her mind was anywhere but where we were as we sat on the banking looking out at the river decorated with bodies in bathing suits splashing one another in the humid city heat.

The funny thing about conversing with your heart is that sometimes the words just don’t come fast enough. That sometimes you are sitting there hearing and watching lips deliver sounds that mean something to you, but you can’t think of anything in the world to say back. Because there are no words. There is nothing that can be said to convey an ending to a beginning of the first time you felt a love so pure and endless that once she tells you it's over and she’s leaving, no sound or language or movement could express the missing you feel. The missing you will endure indefinitely.

The spring is calling now, the birds can’t shut up about it every morning as I stretch my body across my empty bed and cling to the only one of her hairs left on my pillowcase and cry until I feel void of feeling anything at all. It gets easier, they say. That time steals away your memories and the emotions attached to the lacking of her isn’t missing, its just a distant memory from a person you used to know long ago. I scratch my arm as I stare out at the bright earth and smell the flowers. The grass is soft and green under my feet, tickling the back of my neck as I lay down staring up at the vacant blue sky. “I wish you bluebirds in the spring..” I start to sing and finally give in to the silence that is you gone.