The Bookmark He Left in My Favorite Book
A train ticket at chapter twelve, exactly where we stopped.
For two years I owned a book with a locked door in the middle of it.
The book was my favorite before it was ours, a battered novel I had read four times alone, and then made the mistake of reading a fifth time out loud, in bed, with Sam. One chapter a night. That was the rule, his rule, because he said good things should be rationed. He would lie with his head on my stomach so that my own voice reached him twice, once through the air and once through my body, and he claimed the second version was better. It is the single most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me, and he said it about acoustics.
We got as far as chapter twelve.
He left in October, the way fog leaves, so gradually that you cannot name the moment it happened, only the morning you notice the view is empty. There was no scene. He took his records and his good knife and the blue jacket, and he was scrupulously fair about the furniture, and fairness, I learned, is its own kind of cruelty. You cannot even hate a man properly when he leaves you the better lamp.
I found the ticket in November, when I finally picked the book up off the nightstand to shelve it, because the nightstand was becoming a museum and I was becoming its only visitor. It slid out from between the pages and lay there on the duvet.
A train ticket. Regional, off-peak, one way, dated the last Saturday in September, the weekend we went to the coast and ate chips in the rain and he laughed so hard at nothing that a dog barked at him. Our last good weekend, though only one of us had known it at the time.
He had left it at chapter twelve.
Exactly where we stopped. The precise page, marking the precise sentence, as if he might come back any evening, lie down, and say, go on then, one chapter, you know the rule.
People ask what an ex leaves behind and they expect a list of objects. A toothbrush. A phone charger breeding in a drawer. Three socks that match nothing on this earth.
An ex never leaves things behind by accident. Every object is a sentence he did not have the courage to say out loud.
For two years I could not read past that ticket. I want to be clear that I tried. I would pick the book up, get within five pages of chapter twelve... and feel the air pressure change, the way it does before a door opens. Chapter thirteen belonged to a version of my life that had not happened. Reading it alone felt like eating a meal that had been cooked for two people, at a table set for two people, opposite an empty chair. So the book sat on the shelf with a train ticket in its spine like a splinter, and I reread other books, lesser books, books with no doors in them, and told everyone including myself that I was fine.
What finally moved me was the flat. The lease ended. Boxes happened. And on the last night, sitting on the floor of a room with no furniture left in it, surrounded by tape and newspaper, I thought: I am not carrying a locked door to a new address. I made tea in the one unpacked mug and I opened the book to chapter thirteen and I read it out loud, alone, to the bare walls, in the voice I used to use.
Here is what I did not expect... here is the part I have only told two people.
In chapter nineteen, in ballpoint, in his handwriting, a sentence was underlined.
I sat very still for a long time... because you understand what that meant.
He had read ahead.
At some point, in some stolen hour, on some train perhaps, Sam had gone on without me. He had finished our book alone, quietly, before he left, while still lying down each night to hear chapters he already knew, doing a very good impression of a man in the middle of a story. The ticket at chapter twelve was not his placeholder. It was mine.
He had marked the spot where I still was.
The sentence he underlined was about how nobody leaves all at once, how a person departs in small unnoticed installments, and the day they walk out is only the paperwork. He had drawn one straight line under it, no note, no initial. It is the most honest thing he ever said to me, and he said it in someone else's words, in a chapter he knew I would not reach until he was long gone. A confession with a delivery delay of two years.
I did not cry that night, which surprised me. I felt something stranger than sadness: I felt correctly informed, at last. The fog had left a note.
I finished the book at four in the morning on the floor of an empty flat. The ending was better than I remembered and worse than I needed. Then I did something with no logic to it. I moved the ticket. I took it out of chapter twelve, where it had stood guard over the past for two years, and I placed it at the very back, past the final page, in the acknowledgments, where nothing can be interrupted because everything is already over. Some rearrangements are ceremonies. Nobody teaches you this. You find out on the floor at 4 a.m.
In the new flat I started writing again, badly at first, the way you use a limb after the cast comes off. I wrote around him for months, clever poems, evasive poems, poems wearing coats. Then one night I finally wrote about the healing itself, about the ticket and the underline and the door in the middle of my favorite book, and the poem came out in forty minutes with its shoes on. I entered it into a monthly poetry contest mostly so it would stop belonging only to me. It was shortlisted. The judge called it a poem about furniture. She was not wrong. Grief is mostly furniture.
I have read our book twice since, alone, start to finish, no rationing. It has gone back to being mine, or something adjacent to mine, the way a city becomes yours again a few years after a love affair conducted in it. Chapter twelve is just a chapter now. I checked.
Last spring, a new person, careful and warm, saw it on my shelf and said, I have always meant to read this, and my whole ribcage held its breath. We are on chapter five. We read in the afternoons, which is different, and he holds the book himself, which is different, and there is no rule about rationing, which is different. I am letting it be a new beginning instead of a reenactment, and most days I even manage it.
The ticket is still in the acknowledgments. The print has faded to almost nothing now, the date a ghost, the destination illegible. Soon it will just be a small blank rectangle of card, and the last thing he left me will finally say exactly what he said when he left.
Nothing... in his defense, by then I had stopped needing it to.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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