Come as you are; for that is how we’ll remember you.
It was cold, I can remember the mist as your pale smile said goodbye and you turned to step into absence, words caught in ice and wisping from existence just as if the night too had left me alone.
The white light of the streetlamp shone upon the melted snow from above, a reflection of colour washed over the bitumen in dazzling array and illuminated the ground like a city trapped by the waves of an unending ocean.
You were a sentinel, a lighthouse lost of lustre and no longer shining on the shoreline of Halifax. In the last glimpses of departing land, I saw you grow small upon that night, the elongated pull of distance drawing out your goodbye as every star became nothing but the fading of taillights. A dullness was cast over the entire darkening sky.
Bus terminals always feel empty at night, the brown-bricked buildings seem stagnant, an emptiness aglow with fluorescent banality, lined with blue benches of crisscrossed metal, overpainted, and left to simply exist. It’s never a place of warmth to say farewell, it instead rests as a hollow nook of quiet strangers, a place where lost words dwell and remain to be voiceless when the time begins to leave.
Tyres on snow, the dazzle of light passing through the glass as the bus arrives, it was in that last glow that I saw the shoreline, that I was to see the weight of ocean destined to separate us. It was winter and this quiet season would pass time and time again before I would next hear your voice.
Two ships pass through the harbour of Chebucto as I watched you leave; a still warmth was left where we hugged, and I began to feel it recede as you walked over those churning waves to nod goodbye. I saw the trees on the shoreline lain bare by the cold, their branches dead to appearances. I saw myself within the twisting wood, a figure battered by season and held standing through the shock of not knowing how to fall.
I walked down to the harbour after you had left.
The wind carried my directionless step and lifted me to where we had walked as you were growing. Ghosts of our past walked with the wind of this night; footfall in the dew-covered leaves, hot drinks held by mittened hands.
The shadow outline of sky beyond these memories looked to be a foreshadow of more snow as they approached. Growing in volume, columns of colossal cloud blanked the city and were weakly lit by the light of our home. I watched these clouds and thought of that city beneath the ocean, a fairy-tale of drowned existence, a resting ember filled with the memory of a time before.
“You shall return,” I whisper as the salt air allows my words to settle; adrift, they hang upon the surface of the ocean and refuse to be drowned.
“You shall return,” I say again, my voice holding itself in the cold and becoming a thing of realness. More than a belief, these words build themselves into something true and I cast them across the ocean toward where you will soon stand.
This is your home.
The reflection of Dartmouth was frozen in stillness as the first drifts of snow began to land in the water of our harbour. Soft ripples of ever-expanding circles interlinked by the falling snow, the reflected light underneath the waves had become disturbed, scattered by the freeness of a real sky.
I still believe that I’ll see you again, a heart fades but the kingdom of its homeland will forever remember.
Come as you are; for that is how we’ll remember you, and may the wind carry these words to places that my voice never may.
We shall meet again in times of memory, and I’ll await you here at the dawn of that sweet day.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 