TAKE IT FROM A CHARACTER · GET REAL · #2
The love of my youth left on an ordinary morning and came back on the worst one. Seven short notes on the one who leaves.
“You can’t disappear for almost twenty years and come back…”
“…blonde?”
Same deal as last time. I’m made of paper, so you can close me whenever you like. Which means I can tell you things I’d never tell a person with a face.
This one is about Dia. You’ve met someone like her. You may have been someone like her.
1. They leave on the day you heal
She stayed with me through the tattoo she designed for my back. She washed it, put up with my complaints, changed the dressings. Then: “on the very day I removed the last dressing, she disappeared.”
Not a fight. Not a note. The wound closed and the door opened.
People rarely leave in the middle of the storm. They wait until you can stand.
2. You will ask why for years
I had theories. Some of them flattering, most of them not. The one that kept me up longest: “Or had I simply been a project, an elaborate undertaking that ceased to interest her once the work was finished?”
Here’s what I know now. “Why” is a question that keeps the other person in the room. That’s its whole function.
3. You will mistake the goodbye for romance
The last morning, she said something beautiful. Too beautiful for her. I should have heard the ceremony in it.
“Naturally, I had mistaken it for romance. I was in love, which is to say that my critical faculties had been temporarily reassigned to decorative duties.”
If someone suddenly talks to you like a cathedral, check the exits.
4. You can’t throw away a gesture
When the searching stopped, I decided “that if Dia insisted on being absent, I would make the absence official.” Clothes, books, the armchair, the bed. Gone.
Then I tried to get rid of the little habits I’d caught from her. It turns out “disposing of a gesture presents logistical difficulties that no municipal waste service is equipped to address.”
You can empty a flat in a weekend. Your hands take longer.
5. Everybody keeps one thing
I kept a drawing. Hers. “A hundred times I had resolved to burn it.” I didn’t. On the last night in the old flat, I wrapped it and took it with me. “By morning, I had exhausted my arguments but not my cowardice.”
It spent twenty years behind a wardrobe. That’s not storage. That’s a shrine with plausible deniability.
6. They come back at the worst possible moment
She came back on the morning my parents died. In my bed. With a new hair colour. And my first coherent thought, after twenty years, was about the hair.
Grief is a terrible editor. It keeps the trivial and cuts everything you meant to say.
7. What survives
“After almost twenty years, the first thing I can offer the woman I have never stopped loving is an assurance of my undiminished hatred.”
“At least some things have survived intact.”
Hatred is just love that kept the receipt. I’m not proud of it. But it’s the truest sentence on page 2 of my life.
The deal
Starting 10 November, one page of The Apophatic Man a day, here, on Instagram and on TikTok. One page. I’m told that’s how people come back to things: slowly, and against their better judgement.
Homework
What’s the one thing of theirs you couldn’t throw away? Tell me below. I’ll go first: a drawing, behind a wardrobe.
— A.J.
Andrei Jebeleanu is the editor-in-chief at the center of The Apophatic Man, a novel by Marius Tianu. Volume I is out on 10 November. Pre-order it on Amazon →
