Photo by Ümit Yıldırım on Unsplash
On the phone. In a text. From the front seat of the car. On the drive home from work when the rain comes down and the clouds are as steely as winter. On a subway if there's service. From the balcony, waving down in the middle of the night, sneaking out. In the deep end of the swimming pool. The diving board -- a wave, a cannonball, a little scream before you hit the water. Goodbye. From my childhood home: the window above the sink, where we kept small vases of cut flowers: daisies, zinnias, beebalm, and my father watched my mother go to work. From the bedroom of our fifth floor apartment, in the middle of Italy, wrapped in blankets as my husband goes to work. From the front door as I slink out too: the cat, her eyes puzzled, her head turned slightly, her tail flicking this way and that. Down the staircase in tumbles and turns. The way summer fades here -- slow and quiet. The way sunflowers dry up. Autumn comes with its Novembers. The way pinwheeled beach umbrellas are packed up, put away. The last footprints disappear on the cool wet sand, little shivers of waves. So long.
The train station in Rome, where the sounds come thick through the air, where the trains are a thousand children screeching and crying and puffing away and I greeted this world for the very first time, twenty years ago. That way you fall in love with a city. With the stones and squares and fountains. With the sound of Italian off quick tongues. In that square near the Colosseum where I almost lost you. St. Peters in the back of the church, dusty dark corners, gilded light. In Siena once, in the terracotta alleyways where we both cried -- my father and me -- and leaned into the fog with the rain and these years that pass and the way I leaned in to him, both of us in tears, our eyes closed and the sky so grey. In those slow goodbyes -- when are you coming home? Take it easy, see you later, I love you, addio, ciao. In Chicago years before, on the kitchen counter where I left the keys to my ex-boyfriend's apartment and never returned. In Chicago again, but years after, from the airport with my bags all packed, clutching a small quilted pillow and a backpack, my passport and a ticket for Rome in my hand. Blow a kiss. Wave wildly. Say farewell. My grandmother with her butterscotch breath. With her Filipino kisses: her nose pressed to my cheek, one long sniff. My uncle, in the hospital, where my mother read to him, licked her fingers, turned the page. The Good Earth. In Washington DC from a subway stop, cavernous, dark, peering out toward the train that was coming. In Vienna from the train, waving out, our smiles so big, the day has just begun and she is gone. My best friend. In Berlin, in Stockholm, in Amsterdam. In the way we drank coffee in darkened bars, ate steaming bites of apple strudel, stared out the window at the rain. Sang Moon River on the bus over the Danube. In the way we laughed at the years in this friendship, a continent away. In tears sometimes. Many times.
At your side, that day, when we got home too late from my flight from Italy but you were still there, happy to see me, your eyes alive. You weren't gone yet, mom. And the stories we told. And the laughter. And the way I held your hand even when the lights went out. The electric blue lights, the curtains closed, the chairs with their scratchy hospital fabric. We stayed and laughed and we had a month left, this fragile broken month. But that was the moment. Me and my brother and my father and you, like we'd always been. Together. In all the places that you were. A squeeze, a wink. A kiss. A smile. Don't leave me. I love you. Forever and ever. Goodbye.
Jacqueline Goyette is an English teacher and a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in both print and online journals, including JMWW, Heimat Review, Eunoia Review, You Might Need To Hear This, and Cutbow Quarterly. She currently lives in the small town of Macerata, Italy with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom.