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I.
You remember the way he looked when he first looked at you, and you remember the way he looked when you last looked at him, and you think they were not so different, not really. There was a silent, choked desperation in your eyes as there was in his then, a longing that could never be described except to those who had felt it before, and your desires were the same in those moments: you hungered for more life with the thing upon which those eyes (his then, and then yours) were fixed.
You disagreed with him often, but you agreed with him more, even when you thought he was wrong: to you, Frobisher was always agreeable, even in his darkest moods, even in his foulest humours, like a chord with one note off, like a formula with some variable missing.
You were friends with him first, fast friends, and it felt important, and when friends became lovers it was an indistinguishable shift, and it felt important still, only more dangerous, more daring, with more stolen kisses and more skipped heartbeats.
You could pinpoint the place where your love affair began (Corsica, of course, under the stars that could never shine as brightly as he did in your eyes, waves lapping the shoreline, the air full of sea-salt and promise), but you could never pinpoint where your love did. It felt wrong to say even that it was love at first sight, though it was: you never had to fall in love with Robert Frobisher, that is, you had always been in love with him, it just took seeing him (at last, at last) to know it.
You could pinpoint also the place where your love affair ended (Edinburgh, that horrible bathroom, the tile so hard under your knees, the porcelain of the tub with the stains that would never wash out, like the stains on your hands that no one else could see, but to you would never fade), but you could never pinpoint where your love did, because it has no end. You did not love him, for that would imply that the love was over simply because his life was.
Quite the opposite.
Your love for Robert Frobisher was, is, and will always be
solidly
present
tense.
II.
You had a logical mind, something he lacked, but in your passions you were similar. He was a musician, a composer, and you were a scientist, so you supposed that, at heart, you both loved the same things: numbers, inspiration, Robert Frobisher. For you, these loves never wavered, for him, they did so constantly, and it was this that would eventually be his undoing, and ultimately, yours.
You saw him the way he wanted to be seen, beautiful, stunningly so, but you saw him also the way he wanted no one to see him. He showed very little of himself, who he really was, to the rest of the world, but you saw it all anyway, and you knew unlike anyone (perhaps even him) how very ugly he could be.
You loved him for it, like a child loves her favourite doll even when it has gone limp and broken, and the stitches come undone.
You loved him this way then, and you loved him this way after, when he had gone limp and broken, and his stitches had come u n d o n e.
You loved him even as you cleaned his blood from the gun he had stolen from the man who had in some degree killed him, the man he had in all degrees tried to kill.
You loved him even as you collected what pieces of him were left that you could take, the way he had taken the waistcoat which had been a piece of you and was now wrapped around the alien chest of the man downstairs who had not been up to the third floor to stop him.
You loved him, even though he had been so selfish as to see you on the tower, but not make himself known so you might see him.
You loved him even though he had been so selfish as to leave you alone, when he left through your window, when he left you on the tower, unseeing, when he crawled into that tub with the gun in his hand, in his mouth.
You loved him even though he had not believed himself to be so selfish at all.
He was right to say that you were so selfish for wanting to keep him here, with you, in a world he had grown so weary of - but so was he, for wearying of a world that held you in it.
You were both
so selfish.
You honour his memory by reading his letters until the words are burned into your eyelids, and carrying on for decades even after that.
You honour his memory by publishing the sextet, by playing the sextet, filling in the empty spaces in the silence of your solitude, and by trying to understand it's every note as he would have explained them to you had you heard it together. It is so easy to get lost in the music, as it was always so easy to get lost in him.
You honour his memory by living your life, even though he could not live his. You try and live twice as much, though without him, you are never sure you can. There are other smaller loves (loves in your life, not loves of your life, perhaps), but they are not him.
You think you will love him (present tense) forever.
You cannot possibly know how right you are
(or perhaps you can,
and perhaps
you have always known).
III.
You wake gasping some mornings as if drowning, and your hands go to the sides of your body and press out, feeling for the harsh, cold porcelain you are sure you will find, but never do. You dream often of drowning in the bath, of drowning in tears, in blood, but you dream more often of his smile in the morning when you woke side by side, of the smell of sea salt breezes and of the salt of sweat on his skin, of the way he kissed you like he was composing the most beautiful song in the world and you were the staff for his notations, whole notes and quarter notes and rests and codas and key changes and all of it harmonious and perfect.
You wake sighing some mornings as if you have been saved from drowning, and take great pleasure in feeling your own breath in your throat (you do). You dream often of losing him, but more often you dream of keeping him, of the thousand and one nights and days you might have had had the world been less cruel to you, had it been less cruel to him. There are kisses, and more, desperate, breathless nights and quick moments in broad daylight, echos of memories of days that become increasingly bygone as the years tick past you, and time does not dull your memories of him, though it dulls the rest.
A million years could not dull your memories of him (the instances, yes, they will fade some day, but the sentiment: never).
IV.
You meet a woman in an elevator who's skin feels like his, who's skin carries that same mark like his, a woman who is so young and alive and you are so old, and she has the shooting star on her skin and a sparkle in her eyes and an unspoken question on her lips that sounds like “Where have we met before?”
You meet a woman who you feel you can (must) share things with, and you do, and they are brief, but important.
She asks you where you have seen that star before, and you smile so fondly as you tell her it was on the skin of someone you cared about very much, and it is a practiced lie to say it like that.
You have never stopped caring about him, nor could you, and it remains
solidly
present
tense
and so it will continue to be and it is, you suppose, why you tell her she can call you, this woman you have never met before but feel you have known for all your life (or hers, perhaps), this woman with the star on her shoulder that you once (many times) kissed on his back.
You meet her only once, and she will find you as you found him.
Things have not come full circle, because this is only one revolution of the wheel you are both bound to, and there is no way to say what is full, save for the lives and moments you share.
She takes back the letters she once wrote when her hands were not her own and her spirit belonged to a man who you will always be in love with, takes them from underneath your body before your blood can touch them like his blood (her blood?) never touched them, and she reads them and rereads them as you did, and in another revolution another old man will read the book that is written of the woman who reads the letters that were your life together.
So it goes.
V.
True love, you think with a bitter and momentary melancholy, was the irony of your imminent death, and how it so mirrored his bygone one. In a way, you suppose in the second that you could feel the barrel of the gun, so much larger and less elegant than the one you had found him with, pressed up against the back of your throat, you were both dead by your own hands. The report that this man had come to collect, the phone call you had made against your own better judgement, these things had lead to the bullet about to pass through your skull as clearly as his actions had lead to the one that had gone through his.
True love was following him too late because you had owed it to him to live out a good and happy life in the absence of his ability to do so.
True love was that, even as the shot was fired, your last recollection was not of him as you were about to be, but of him as he had been when you had last been together:
It was the clarity of his smile in your mind’s eye in spite of all the years between when he had given it to you and now.
It was the smile you returned as your last act, knowing your body would be discovered with all that was now left of his - the letters, worn from rereading, gripped too long in ever ageing fingers, because it was impossible to let him go, as it was impossible for him to let you go, as his hands (her hands) would grip the letters soon and they also would be unable to let go.
Death was a candle’s flame, snuffed out in a pinch,
a door slamming quickly in a gust of wind,
a new door opening before your eyes.
There is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith. (you reach out, and his ring on your finger catches the light, and you take the doorknob)
A better world. (and you turn it)
You open the door to the sound of his music, the music that he had become when he was no longer a man, but before he had become the woman you met in the elevator, and you revel in it for a moment before the doorway leads you through the clouds and into unconsciousness.
VI. (a post-script)
You open the door in another world. (a better world?)
You do not know it yet, but your love is still,
and always will be
solidly
present
tense.