Imeros

end to the poems. That desperate push to try and find the words is pulled back, and there is nothing but space left, page after empty page left blank in the notebook. Melissa had died.

  There may not be a less vivid reflection of what he was feeling at the time than these blank pages. There was no blankness, nothing was absent at the time. Instead, he was a raw nerve, full of pain, feeling everything. He spent whole days pulling himself from the brink of falling beyond the wall of reality. He wanted so badly to believe that it wasn't true—that she wasn't gone—that he very nearly faded away with her.

  He can still remember when the pages finally came back. He desperately didn't want to let her fade away, didn't want his memories of her to die with her body, and he was delusional enough to believe that he could continue falling in love with her if he could just keep those memories alive. He really believed that holding on to her, no matter what the circumstances, was his only hope for a life worth living without her.

  So, as soon as he was able to write again, a new notebook was opened, and it was quickly filled with a fury of ink. A conversation had begun. A place had opened up, a mythical place where he could be with her, a place where she could touch his heart again, and he could speak to her with this new voice he had found. The voice that she gave him.

  This voice was the Imeros voice.

  And as he read these poems again, looked at the sloppy speed of the handwriting, the urgency that was there, he knew that if he ever wanted even a hint of that urgency back, he would have to let Joelle go.

  The problem is that he never had the choice of letting Melissa go for the sake of his poems, and it wouldn't have been much of a choice. He loved Melissa so thoroughly, so unquestionably, that the whole idea of letting her go willingly would've been a farce.

  But life is so different than it was when he was twenty-two. There are other considerations to be made. The simplicity of his life would be made more complicated if he were to keep Joelle, and there's no guarantee that the chaos that would follow such a decision would deliver his voice again. And he's learned to recognize how important, how integral writing poems has come to represent his happiness. He also knows that keeping the simplicity of his current life, and longing for something he's lost, is the only hope of finding the happiness that the work can give him.

  Still, there is no question—even now, knee deep in work about Melissa—that Joelle has become an omnipresent force in his life. And Joelle and Melissa have become so intertwined in his mind now. Maybe because it was Joelle who brought Melissa back to him. But he can't seem to think of one without the other, like their mythologies have been inextricably married in his mind.

  But time makes mythologies into something more potent than plain memory. Time adds flourishes to individual moments, adds subtle lies to the truth of the past. It folds one moment seamlessly over another, adds brushstrokes to romanticize the real life backdrops of a memory, reduces long periods of slow tedium into profound periods of fullness, replaces self-doubt with security, and makes even the most difficult moments seem more poetic than sad. And, after a time, we confuse what's true with what's myth. Maybe we choose to forget. Truth is always less potent, more realistic than the worlds we build with what's left of love.

  So, even though it seems like choosing to let Joelle go and rediscovering that Imeros voice—climbing back into that mythical world again—is an easy decision, it isn't. Losing love never is. Even knowing that some greatness might follow the pain of losing her, it won't minimize the pain.

  There's a knock at the door. Rachael pokes her head in.

  "What are you doing?" She asks.

  "Just going through some old papers."

  "Yeah? What for?"

  "No reason. Just looking back, I suppose."

  "Well, I wanted to remind you about the reception tonight for Dr. Ludlow."

  "Who?"

  "Dr. Ludlow. Remember? I told you he was retiring at the end of the quarter."

  "Right. Wow. There really are only a couple weeks left, huh?"

  "Yeah. It goes fast. It always does," she says, and then looks around absently as if she were trying to find something to say. "So, are you coming?"

  "Did I say I would?"

  "Well, not exactly, but I told you about it several weeks ago, and you usually come with me to these things."

  "Why don't you take your Indian friend? You seem to like spending the evenings with him," he says, and even he's surprised by his candor. He knew he'd felt jealous, maybe even a little angry when David first told him, but he wasn't expecting his response to sound so biting.

  "So, you talked to David?"

  "I did."

  "He's just a student, Jacob. And he's not Indian. He's Pakistani. I'm advising him on his dissertation."

  "I've never advised a student over dinner at a nice out-of-town restaurant."

  "Oh, come on. Don't make this into something it's not. He's Middle Eastern, and doesn't have many friends here. He told me about this restaurant and asked if we could meet there for our next meeting, and I didn't see the harm in it."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  "Well, I don't like it."

  "I'm not in the habit of asking my husband's permission before I do something work related."

  "Don't try to turn this around on me. It was inappropriate and you know it. You said as much when you were interrogating me about David the other day."

  "Interrogating you?"

  "That's what I said."

  "I'm surprised you're acting so jealous. You've been so distant lately, I'm relieved you still care at all."

  "That's not fair, Rachael."

  "I'll tell you what's not fair. Being treated like a stranger in my own home." She waits for him to respond. He doesn't. "Anyway, I can assure you that there wasn't anywhere near as much intimacy at our table as there was at David's."

  "Nothing happened?"

  "Nothing."

  "Are you attracted to him?"

  "Jacob—"

  "Just answer the question."

  "Maybe a little. I guess, more to the point, I'm attracted to the attention he pays me. I'm attracted to the fact that he seems to enjoy my company."

  "So, you'd acknowledge that your trip to Bradford had a little more subtext than just a working dinner?"

  "Jacob?"

  "You're not answering me."

  "Nothing happened."

  "That's not what I'm asking."

  "Well, what about you? What about that girl I saw you with on our porch a while ago?"

  "She's our neighbor, Rachael. She didn't accompany me to dinner."

  "Yeah, but I saw the way you looked at her, and I saw you being that guy you are when—"

  "What guy?"

  "The quiet charmer. You know."

  "No, I don't know."

  "You were being the guy you were when I fell in love with you."

  "Who am I now?"

  "That's just it. I don't know if I know who you are anymore," she says, looking at him, the sadness evident in her eyes. She looks tired just saying the words.

  Jacob takes a breath and leans back in his chair. It's clear that her sudden vulnerability has made him uncomfortable. "I'm not sure what to say here. We've obviously not been doing well, and I'm not sure what we can do about it."

  "We work through it. That's all."

  "How? You've already started looking elsewhere for emotional fulfillment." Even as he says it, he is aware of the irony.

  "Oh, Jacob, come on. Don't be so dramatic. We both get a new pool of young twenty-somethings in our lives every semester. There have been many innocent flirtations before now, and hopefully there will be more. I'm not going to lie about it. I like the attention. It keeps me feeling young, and, though I'm growing older, the attention keeps me feeling desirable. And I need to be desired. These are the things that keep me going, give me energy. We can't constantly make each other feel bad for wanting to feel good. As long as our flirtations are innocent and we are fai
thful to one another, then things will be fine. And I know I've been faithful. What about you?"

  "Of course."

  "Then we just need to keep working on this. We're both in our forties now and I've got a feeling we're both struggling with the demons of age, but that's something we can help each other through."

  "Except that whenever I bring anything up, you want to send me to a therapist."

  "Because you're... Jacob, look at yourself."

  "What?"

  "You're sitting there sifting through papers from Imeros—a book published more than twenty years ago. You live in the past. I've always known that about you. I've always known that we would forever be dealing with Melissa in one way or another, but I had no idea that she would continue to be such a persistent ghost in our lives.

  "Talk about getting emotional attention from elsewhere. I've been trying to get the attention you only give to her from day one, but I just can't chase her away. I've always known that I couldn't compete with her. She wasn't around long enough for you to see her faults. And I can't compete with the perfection she represents to you."

  "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be so... I wish I could let it go."

  "No, you don't. She's what drives you. She's your muse. I've always known that, accepted it even. But don't expect me to want to talk to you about your feelings for her, or your trying to resurrect her by reading old poems, or having dreams about her."

  "No, I don't suppose that's fair."

  "I don't need fairness. I just need you to be present—with me—more often."

  "I'm sorry," he says to her, and for the first time in weeks he can see through the hostility he has felt for Rachael. And he can see that his anger toward her has always been because she was what