Leaving for Christmas

I was sad to say goodbye to him on the last morning we spent together before I went off to Vancouver, and he home as well. Sad, but not as sad as I’d worried that I might have been. Sad in the way that a mostly mentally stable girl would probably have been in the same situation.

“I won’t see you for nearly three weeks,” I said to him as we stood up from the breakfast table, the two of us. All of our collected debris was still laid out: the nice white cheeses, butter in a little saucer. Two empty coffee cups. He was leaving in just a day, and I was coming back right toward the end of the first week of January. It would be some time.

“Oh, but you know, three weeks really isn’t so long.” And I suppose that to him, it wasn’t. Even to me it didn’t seem interminable. But he did have a kind of wisdom, spurred on by age, that made him feel larger than life to me. Above me in some way, as though he knew things I couldn’t imagine knowing. Not in a condescending way; he himself never made me feel small. But something about him made me feel tiny, delicate. Like I could fit in the palm of his hand.

“Come here,” he murmured. I stepped over to him and he kissed me, rich and full, straight on the lips. He knew. I was still not quite used to that yet, the way he always knew. “We’ll see each other very soon.”

And I knew we would. I was teary on my walk back to the metro, it’s true, but only in the way that girls with cushioned lives get teary. A girl who had the luxury to sniffle a little bit out in the beautiful historic centre of Madrid, beneath the trees with their lovely Christmas lights, the day still bright enough that they were turned off. I’d pulled myself together by the time I boarded the train, rubbed my coat sleeve against my eyes absently. A girl who felt sure that she was just fine.