Echoes

Inside this apartment, now emptied of any sign you ever lived here, the floors and walls echo as I slowly walk room to room. Here is where your couch was, and there, your chair. We sat in this room, night after night, talking for hours--just as friends. Until, finally, one night, you came over from your chair to sit beside me on the couch.

In this other room, your office, with all of the wires in and out of computer equipment, and your design tools, neatly arranged. Your office chair and the little wooden chair near it, where I sat for hours, as we researched places to go together -- New York, Mexico, Hawaii, Gold Country, places north and other locations we never got around to seeing. Here, too, is where you would scribble down a list of movie titles, theatres, and times, whenever we were getting ready to go downtown and see a film.

In there, the kitchen, were the stack of menus, from which you'd order -- Indian, Chinese, Cambodian, Japanese. Here's where the ice cream and chocolate-covered bananas you loved were stashed; and there is the door where we first let the cat go outside from. He was so skittish, for so long, that cat. I worked hard to gain his trust. In the end, it was me who convinced you to let him out, after his six long months indoors. I think he knew that and he always rubbed up against me after that.

This wall is where you hung one bit of artwork, that wall is where you put another piece. Over here, a TV, mainly used for movie rentals; there a sound system that might play The Flaming Lips or Al Green, among others. I could always tell your mood from the music. Over there was the box of toys and jewelry the kids loved to dig into.

Down this hall you strung a clothesline. And in there was the bedroom.

***

Once a place like this has been vacated, is all memory of its previous inhabitants lost?

The walls cannot talk, nor the floors or ceilings. Maybe this particular space still yearns for your return -- and mine. Maybe even the cat's.

After all, such a place has witnessed the unique life and love only we could provide. It knows more than anyone outside of the two of us about what transpired here.

Worlds within a world, private chaos amidst a big city's swirling dreams.

As I walk down these stairs for the last time, I think I hear a soft tune playing on the wind, a tune kissing me good-bye. "Freebird." I zip my jacket up against the chill, and walk through the city alone.