Word Count: 316
When was the last time I saw her? It had to be the week that she left. Just a few days before she boarded the plane that took her away forever.
I was stubborn, I know, and angry and even resentful. A year, she said, just a year and then she’d be back and complete the dream of a life spent together forever. She would write every day, she promised, and call me whenever she could. She didn’t know if there was internet service in the village–I said I doubted they’d even have running water–and she smiled and said she was sure they’d have mail and maybe even a phone.
She never called, she never wrote. The plane that I wouldn’t even watch her get into took off like a bird and fell somewhere just over the jungle. I watched the search party on the TV.
So the last time I saw her I was hiding behind a thick wall I had built that I had expected she’d jump, leap, crawl up to and over to stay on the safe side with me. Instead she grew cloudy and distant before any distance was there. Instead of committing her red lips to memory, her eyes to a space in my mind of their own, I edited all that she was, that she said on that last day to my own brand of despair and selfish longing. I ruined that very last memory with sepia toned thinking and faded the bold and bright colors she offered me there.
I wish I had been more understanding. I wish I had the good sense to hold her tight one last time. Had I known it was really the end, the last time, I would have sent her off with a song that blazed red and yellow with flame. Instead I am left with the ashes of only regret.
