We Will Remember Him:

Aching With Emily Dickinson

Heart, we will forget him!
You and I, tonight!
You may forget the warmth he gave,
I will forget the light.

When you have done, pray tell me
That I my thoughts may dim;
Haste! lest while you're lagging.
I may remember him!

I read the lines a dozen times, and still I cried reading them. Just as she had done, I suspected, living and writing them. I wasn’t a great scholar of Dickinson; I’d always intended to read her, but hadn’t. So it must have been fate that made me pick up her poems that night, of all nights, when I so desperately wanted not to remember his warmth and light, so desperately longed to dim my own thoughts. Hers and mine were different “hims,” a century apart; and yet I knew, reading her perfect lines, that our hearts ached in the same way, though separated by a hundred years.

I stood no chance of not remembering, and haste, or lack of it, would make no difference. It was still too soon. His light and warmth still filled every corner of my world and heart – just as it had for her when she wrote those words that joined us that night, by the heartache that even death could not extinguish. And just as she did not really want to forget, neither did I. There might come a time of forgetting, or at least remembering less, or perhaps just hurting less, but it would not be that night – maybe never. She had not destroyed the poem, after all; she had kept it to read, and remember, another night.

My him had told me it was time to end it at the end of what had been an almost perfect day. Perfect because the sky was luminous and blue, the air was sweet with the scent of spring flowers, the year was young, as we were, and most of all, because we were together and in love. At least I thought we were. For sure, I was.

Why it was that day, of all days, when he chose to end it I couldn’t fathom. There had been days when we’d argued, and days when we both almost knew there was no chance for a long-term, not for us. He hadn’t ended it on any of those days. Nor on any of the days when family and life expectations, coercions, disappointments bombarded us from either or both sides. Not ended then either. And even on the days, and nights, occasional ones, when we seemed really to have nothing to hold us together, he hadn’t done it. So why, on that near perfect day had he said the words I wished I could not remember? Perhaps because it was so nearly perfect that we both knew it could get no better (though I would not acknowledge it, even to myself). And so, to stay perfect, at least in memory, it had to end.

He made it as gentle as such things can ever be. He leaned over and kissed my lips. Not in the lustful way we’d both relished for the while we’d been together, with tongues twining in closed-eyed wet warmth until our bodies could no longer stand to be apart, and twined as closely, as warmly as our tongues. Not in that way, but in the almost chaste way of love without lust, softly and tenderly and sweetly. He put his palms on my cheeks as our lips touched, and then he ran his fingers into my long hair, caressing my head and looking into my eyes. It would be hard to imagine a more perfect moment, and I felt a peace an joy that warmed my whole body in a way that lust never could have done.

I sensed that the moment and the joy and the warmth came with a danger I’d never felt before, and that I couldn’t avoid, and wouldn’t have avoided even if I could. And so I wasn’t surprised when he spoke the words, though I was devastated. And I knew that there was nothing I could do, nothing I could say, to make the words never have been spoken – and that, now they had been spoken, my only task, my only hope, was to accept them.

With other breakups I’d protested, cried, bargained. With this one, I simply acquiesced. It was to be, and not to accept that was impossible – somehow I knew that in my core without question or doubt. It made me sad; I wiped away a quiet tear with my finger, and would have cried more, but there seemed no  point. So I saved those tears for later – for after he had gone.

And then he was gone, and I cried the tears and re-read the lines – read them altered, the way we both, she and I, knew they would really be: Heart, we will not forget him! You nor I, tonight or any night! You will not forget his warmth, I will not forget his light. We will not have done, our thoughts not dim; we will remember him!