by Em Haas
I met you—really met you—three years ago. We had been simple acquaintances before, just two passing, pleasant ships, but you took the place beside me once and then you were suddenly close to me always. I remember I thought it wondrous you even remembered my name, even though you had your head on my shoulder and we’d been friends for more than a year by then. I told you how lucky I felt to have you at the two year mark and you laughed at me, fond and not cruel. What a coincidence, you said. I feel just the same about you.
The thing about absence is you never think to account for it until it’s too late. Something is there until it’s not, and until that moment comes, absence is itself absent. Time never accommodates for human desires, you told me once, but this loneliness feels like a personal cruelty, like Time knew of the soreness it would leave behind and set itself into motion anyway. I should feel lucky for it, I think, should be capable of feeling fondness amid the distance, but I don’t. I feel nothing but the place left open and starving beside me. It wants you just as much as I do.
I find you again in two fluid ounces of hair cream. Of course this is the way, the small, glorious, wondrous way, I meet you again for the first time since we set out on our own paths. I cradle the teaspoon of it I’ve taken into my hand and bring it to my nose and you’re tucked into my shoulder again. My eyes slip shut and I can feel the bend of your arms around my sides, the press of your fingers into my shoulderblades. You always gave one final, tight squeeze before letting me go, and I think I feel that then, too. Is that you? I ask, and you hear me, thank God you hear me, and it’s Yes you say, yes, of course it’s me. You remembered. That’s ridiculous, I think as I spread the palliative across my palms, rake handfuls of you through my hair. How could I not?
Em Haas is a writer from suburban Minnesota. They are a recent graduate of St. Olaf College, where they studied English, Creative Writing, and Ancient Greek, and their previous work can be found in the institution’s interdisciplinary magazine, The Quarry. When they’re not writing, they can be found spending time with family and friends, reading a fantasy novel, or thinking about the Iliad.