Every year as August comes to an end and as summer gives in to fall I experience a dreadful uneasiness that ruthlessly threatens all the harmony accumulated during those summer seaside months. Some kind of somber melancholia takes over me and rattles my core, exposing me to everything I’ve so carefully and deliberately ignored during those months of sun and water. It’s as if autumn, with its heavy rains, washes away my tanned skin and the illusion of slow, peaceful living that I’ve been so diligently working at.

You always loved autumn, the season of new beginnings, out with the old, in with the new; always left your old skin behind and moved on to a new love, a new job, a fresh start. I don’t know if that’s the reason I hate it so much or if there’s anything else tucked away inside of me, a memory of sorts that I don’t dare touching for fear of becoming undone. Maybe my father left us during the autumn, I wouldn’t really remember. It’s not only that I was too young to form an accurate memory, but rather that his presence in my life seemed to be a long act of leaving. In a way, yours turned out to be the exact same thing. You were more absent than present and thus your absence became the most present thing in my life. We were more often unhappy than happy and we were more often apart than together. Perhaps you, following his trail, have become the great Absent in my life. The living dead, the Revenant. The hunter. The deceiver. The great yearning. The shackle and the chain. The one which is forever a longing and never a reality. The one which I can only touch inside my head, with eyes closed, in moments of great vulnerability and pain.

I had a dream the other night that we had met again on some dark, dirty street and had embraced under a lamp post with such warmth that it pierced through all these separating years. You pressed your lips so hard on mine that they were hurting and I could feel your tongue, so familiar, make its way inside my mouth, so tenacious as if it were searching for my soul. Immediately after, the dream dissolved into nightmare and I found myself in a pastel colored bedroom full of black cockroaches crawling all over the candy-looking floors and on the pale-blue walls. I don’t remember being disgusted as I always am at the sight of an insect but I was determined to kill them at all costs. This determination seemed to be the only dominant feeling I was capable of and so I grabbed an insect repellant and sprayed away all around me until at some point I couldn’t breathe anymore. I just had to kill them, I just had to, even if I was collateral damage.

I need to let you go. I need to let go of the dream of you. You clearly already have, you’ve perfected the art of leaving people behind. A true virtuoso in the field of absence, you move through life with ease and grace as if you were made for it, burning bridges but walking proudly on what’s left of them. I never understood this metaphor of burning bridges until recently. Perhaps sometimes you have to burn a bridge because seeing your way back might make you take it again. I realize now that I need to stop seeing the bridge. So that I can let go of the dream of you. I need to reconcile myself with autumn, I need to find a way to live in the present. I need to let you go. I will make it my full time job, I will dedicate wish and will to learning how to leave, how to leave my old skin behind, how to ignore this longing that has its claws deep in me. I will let go. I will learn from you. I will kill these cockroaches, I will kill these feelings and I will wipe away their memory too. I will no longer know what color your eyes are, what you taste like, how your touch feels, how you call my name. It will all have been a dream inside a nightmare inside a dream.

In the cathedral of hope I have built for us we will be nothing but ghosts.