A place for everything

Write a story in which the first and last sentences are exactly the same. That’s what someone once said, so she listened and began to write, not words with a purpose, maybe just to write because some things need a forever attached to them.

She thought how fortunate it had been to understand what that forever meant for her and knew she could prove it. Such a good feeling, maybe even more than good. This is how it had all started:

There had been eight words (in English, I think I’m falling in love with you), seven in another language that also exists in the world (Creo que me estoy enamorando de ti), and that were exactly the same thing, no matter they weren’t eight. Either way, the size of the words was the size of the world. A new one.

So simple: I think I’m falling in love with you. He says. (She didn’t really need to translate, but she automatically did it anyway.) There was nothing unique in the sentence, although it was the first time anybody had said it to her. And except that the progressive tense in the affirmation - I’m falling - immediately enveloped her in a completely unanticipated process, pulling her in close but not in a smothering way, and proffering an inescapable calm. She was home.

Home would be redefined over time, but then home is like that nowadays. Still, it never ceased to exist because it was them, and nowhere else. It hurt, oh it hurt, but the having, even when not holding, was the entire point. It floated there, lay there, joined there, met, spoke, ebbed and returned, but it was there. Never in a place, not really, but solid, like breathing.

Many stories would flow as well from those first seven or eight words, of which a few were worthy of salvaging and many others drowned themselves in banality that was generally of her own doing. She was always with her nose flat up against the window of life, her life, and often missed the best parts. It was hard to focus on those, because even the good things, she thought, came underserved. Like the I think I’m falling in love with you. She hadn’t been destined to hear that said to her, ever, but once heard, she claimed it. Swallowed it, let it rush through her veins, everywhere it could. The words were hers and she became the words. Nothing else mattered.

The story is long and would be longer than you’d like, I’m sure, but it can also be summarized. Should be shortened, because the world has no need for voyeurs.

The decades could not be stopped. Home could. Almost. She refused to believe it, despite knowing exactly where home was. As long as she lived, those seven or eight words, those seven or eight seconds, were hers, were her. Nothing else mattered, and finally, quite a few years into it, she knew her decision had been the right one. Not her words, because they had long since faded. Or maybe she had forgotten because she’d never needed them. Her words had always been irrelevant, and that humble thought was a comfort.

Then the home divided shifted.

She left, went back, to fulfill a promise. She would show those words a bright, precise mirror. He would remember her again, just as he had at the beginning. He would sail forth from the chair with wheels and come to rest on her shore. He would be home again in what he had created.

None of this was really as precise in his head as she, his shining mirror, would have liked it to be. However, the there that had once been there (sorry, Gertrude Stein) was still there. It was simply different. Once distance had roamed their world and he had lived with that more than with her. As his tide ebbed, however, he saw her better, or maybe she had learned to speak better. Maybe she had begun to focus less on the nail in her heart that she had wrenched free (sorry, Rosalía), and more on the pain of its absence.

Knowing how much she had acquired of herself from that absence, she knew at last that she’d never be alone. She had a home there, and went to tend to it. A promise, even if forgotten or never made aloud, must be kept. She was many things, many of them useless, but she was also a memory of herself hearing those seven or eight words.

And so she came to care for him when he could not. These situations are never easy to describe and I’ve gone through one myself, so I know the details are unnecessary and might even be cruel. That - cruelty - is not a place where saying things is of greatest importance; doing them, being able to do them, is. She stayed, aware that she was losing the source of those few words, ones that stayed with her when almost everything else had abandoned her.

At last the words, his words anyway, came to a gentle stop, like a starfish on the beach as the wave retires, having gone elsewhere. Her words were still there, but she had little need to remember them any longer. Her eyes looked at him and pressed the syllables all over the rigid brows, the wrinkled, sand like dermis, the spikes of hair like armeria on a windy cliff. Seathrift, they also called it, and in a third language it will remain a secret. There was little left but the sound of syllables being dashed on the shore of life, endlessly and forever.

Except the eyes smouldered, the shoulders, so long distant and incapable of even the tiniest embrace, those shoulders flickered like two strong candles. They had returned to assume their rightful place, they gleamed in beauty like the night (apologies to the poet whose name I cannot recall), they assessed it all, and they knew what they always should have known, must have known:

She wasn’t going anywhere, no matter which tide came in and which ebbed. He knew this and then uttered the only words he could ever utter, and they were uttered somewhere, once more:

I think I’m falling in love with you. He says the exact same thing. Again. She had believed him once and she had been correct, had insisted on being correct, could only have survived all those decades because she made them be correct. End of story. Their story. The world and everything in it. She gave the only answer possible, the one she had forgotten despite the fact that the progressive tense had meant it was always there, always in progress. Her words now, because his were no longer:

I think I’m falling in love with you.