I don’t think we revisit the past. We write each journey back like a story, using the unreliable, movie-still fragments of memory. Sometimes it is a snatch of a conversation, or a detail of something insignificant, or a smell, or the way the air or the sun felt on my skin in that moment, the discomfort of a knot in the wrong place. A sensory slide-carousel of recall. Each piece so loaded, each so fragile, each so poignant that it threatens to overwhelm me, to swallow me up in the whirlpool of time.
I got an email today from the wife of an ex-lover. She started off by apologizing for her poor English skills – a very Japanese thing to do – and then informed me that her husband had committed suicide three days ago and that she’d found my contact details amongst his things and felt she should inform me.
It was only crazy serendipity that I even bothered to check that email account today. It is an old one I hardly ever check. The email could have sat there on the server for months, unopened, unread, unanswered.
I haven’t answered it yet. I think perhaps it would be better if I didn’t. I don’t know what she knows about me. If I don’t answer it, perhaps she’ll just find it easier to forget the leftover detail of me. If I answer, I will be the detritus of the deep past gouging a ragged hole into the present of her misery. Shouldn’t I afford her that: the un-nness, the non-ness of me?
I left him fourteen years ago: him and the country where I met him. I left because I thought it was the right thing to do. I left because I thought I made him lose his sense of proportion, because something about me made him careless. Because I worried he would ruin his life on account of me. Then, I left the city because I could not breathe in it knowing he was there.
He was the first man I ever let cut my skin. He smeared his cheek through the trickle of blood he’d drawn. He wore the stain of it, drying on his face when he said that I made him feel stateless, cultureless, genderless, beyond all those things we manufacture as part of our identities. But I had been nothing but the vehicle by which he chose to set himself free – for those few hours out of time.
When I arrived in Saigon, I lay in tiny, closed-in room, naked and sweltering in the hideous blackness of the heat like a junkie. I cried for whole days without stopping. I cried until I was dehydrated and there were no more tears. I sweat until my sheets were wet, until I stopped peeing. I cried so loud that my landlady shoved notes under my door, written in broken English.
“Please stop. You make us afraid.”
She left bowlfuls of fruit outside my room and I smelled them go rotten in the heat. Their sickly sweet stench carried on the breeze that came under the door with the acid green light of the fluorescent strip in the hall.
I cried and I masturbated. Once for each of the different ways I remembered he had fucked me, the ways he’d made me come. He had strangely female hands. Long delicate, precise fingers. A beautiful cock the colour of milky tea; the perfect size for sucking.
In spates of blind, vicious anger at what I had given up I gouged scratches into my cunt with blunt fingernails. Over and over, I sat up in the dark, gasping through raging panic attacks, so sure I had done the wrong thing. I packed my bags, called the airlines to book a ticket back, then changed my mind and unpacked so many times, it became a comic ritual.
It is strange that the memories of leaving him are so much stronger than my memories of being with him.
I will never know if I did the right thing. All I know is that, at the time, doing it cost me so much, I spent the next decade convincing myself that it was. We tell ourselves the most outrageous lies for sanctuary, don’t we?