By Jessika Grewe Glover

I haven’t thought about Antibes in a while. In the beginning, each memory came on like a rogue wave, steering my mental vessel off course. I had little separation between holding your heart and understanding I was meant to let it go. Antibes pressed in often, a thumb on the bruise of our former life. The years were kinder to the thoughts, allowing them to release, digits pulling from skin, the capillaries shrinking to what they had been, yet always just a thumb print away from rising again. I don’t know why I thought of that walled town in the South of France today. Perhaps the clink of a glass in the far reaches of my mind, or the scent of coconut, so much like that cheap perfume I purchased on the strand when we were drunk on rosé and falling into one another. Our sweat-soaked skin was sticky and slippery between us, yet we had to be touching. Arms around waists and heads tilted like divining rods towards the other. After all these years I am sickened and not at all surprised that the idea of you still tugs at me. The magnetic force I could never leave behind. 

Here I sit, closer to you than Antibes, yet somehow, that ancient seaside with its stone structures and juniper-lined cliff walks, is more within grasp. Because you have become someone else. A half corporeal specter carrying a torch for a person you thought you should become. The thumb print on my heart depresses when I think of who you were to me and who you are now. Waves roll through my chest as though you left yesterday, when, if I had been counting, I would know it has been six years, twenty-seven days, and roughly thirteen hours. You see, these numbers tumble in the tide of my soul, an intermittent riptide, never pulling me under, yet always holding me from coming ashore and moving on. 

I hear your name called for coffee, and I look up, a Pavlovian response to everyone who has your name. A flash of dark hair and long fingers reaching for your order has me catch my breath. Maybe I call you, maybe you feel my stare, but you look up. Someone stands behind you, and I don’t know if you’re together, and in this altered moment, I can’t bring myself to know. Because in this slip of time between losing you all those years ago and when you inevitably walk out the glass doors, your dark hair is threaded through my own fingers. Your mouth is on my jawline, our bodies drawn into a tight line, ducked between limestone buildings off the market square. In this stolen frame, I am not just remembering the life we had, but I am once again living it. 

Sounds pull me back to the present, where the bustle of morning in the city surrounds us, and I think you felt it too. Your fingers clutch your cup, hollowing the paper. Someone behind you touches your arm, a possessive gesture I once knew. Our eyes hold a second longer before you back away, setting me adrift once more. I call out. As I should have done six years ago. You stop to listen. 

I say I miss you. I say you were always perfect. I say I want you to be happy. 

What I don’t say is I wanted you to be happy with me. I don’t say I am still in love with you. I don’t say that I know, like I know the tide will rise again, that there will never be a tomorrow where I don’t love you. 

I notice your thumb still crushing your cup, and I feel it like it’s pressing my wound, the skin over my heart begging for release. When you shoulder past the doors, I stay standing, remembering Antibes.