his absent presence

It is my regrettable habit to come here and remember.
Every morning before mother wakes up, wanting my company and her breakfast, I come to this field that lies a short distance from the house I fear I'll live in forever. There is nothing outstanding-looking about this field. One needs to have past memories to see the extraordinariness of such an ordinary place. The field's plethora of clover holds no lucky four-leafs that anyone has ever found, but rather memories in soothing, green abundance. The sharpest eye on earth couldn't spot the two entwined souls that once lay in the clover; they're only a remembrance now.
Even the lone tree in the upper right corner of the field holds no man-made scars, outward crude initials on its bark; the backs that together leaned against its trunk left no imprint.
There are birds, ever present, though not always noticed. Sometimes I hear echoes of past conversations as if the birds were parrots and mynas instead of robins and wrens.
"Many don't come back." I hear him say.
He said it so many times and my mind repeated it back. Sometimes I think it was just a lesson I memorized to mindlessly drone in reply to those who asked what my knowledge amounted to. Yet at the same time, I did know it and feel it and taste it. It felt like a punch, tasted like blood in my mouth.
Still, it did not prepare me for this outcome. I expected black or white... not this disconcerting grey.

Every time I go to see him echoes from the field follow.
"I will love you forever."
I look into his eyes and search for that forever in their blue blankness. Nothing is there.
"It is okay to move on when... if I am gone." His voice in my mind says.
I look down at his pale hand I grasp. "Why didn't we ever define the word 'gone'?" I ask, though he never notices or responds. "Your body is here, but your mind has folded into itself as if it never existed. If I should lay my head upon your chest your heartbeat would pound underneath my searching ear. Does your heart still function in ways besides its task of pumping blood?
I prepared myself to love you without an arm or a leg; I don’t know what to do with someone who has lost everything except their outward appendages. I was ready to love whatever havoc guns and army life would wreak on you. Without second thought, I would have stayed by your side always, stopped the nights from tearing you apart with unseen claws.
You were mine, that was enough. Now I don't know who you belong to. You're lost in a land they tell me you will never return from."
Whether I cry these things aloud or just think them makes no difference; he doesn't hear either way.


Somehow my remembering of the past and how we once were always turns into an inventory of my present. I must go in soon and get mother her breakfast. My skirt is damp from the dew-stained clover. Mother will look at my soggy skirts disapprovingly, as she does every day. Perhaps she knows the field is where I keep my memories and each morning I sit among them as they roam around me. She thinks I need to move on, she and her friends plot together and introduce me to men deemed suitable who are all wrong. (They aren't him.)
She doesn't understand. For now I must, I must keep coming here. But I feel... and am more than reluctant to admit that there may come a time when I won't come anymore; I will have moved on and will want to forget. Though I admit this, it still frightens me; I don't want to become someone who wants to forget.
I almost get up to leave, but I decide to surrender. I lie down in the clover and stare into the blank sky. I shut my eyes and let the memories close in on me. Mother's breakfast will have to wait.


(This story was inspired by a character in the Maisie Dobbs mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear. A character "...whose terrible injuries in the Great War had rendered him incapacitated in body and mind." [from the third book in the series "Pardonable Lies".])

{Painting is 'Girl in Field' by Eric Hu.}