She left at dawn. Her goodbye was quick, efficient, and the kind that leaves room for possibility rather than making declarations. The island took her in like a net, and then she was gone from the city as if she'd never been there at all. I waited to hear from her during the next week and the week after; sometimes there is a moment after meeting someone that wants to be stitched into the rest of your life, but stitches need two hands. The messages we send to make things continue were small—an out-of-context photograph of a lamppost, a sentence about a stray cat—and sometimes they were answered: a single line, a scanned postcard of a map with an X placed somewhere whimsical.
She told me about a seaside town where the streets ran like capillaries; about a sister who kept jars of buttoned feelings; about a small gallery where she once left a drawing taped to the wall with a note that read, "Take this if you need it." When she described the drawing, her fingers traced an outline in the air as if shaping it. I asked questions I didn't know I'd been holding, and she answered as if she had been waiting for those particular questions.
I learned later that the residency she spoke of was a two-week thing on an island where cell service was a courtesy. She admitted she would be leaving the next morning. That admission should have changed the arc of what we were doing—should have made our meeting feel theatrical, frantic—but instead it made everything quieter and more urgent in the way of small truths. We bought a cheap camera from a stationary shop and stood on a pier framing the harbor with clumsy competence, arguing about whether photographs should be accurate or kind.
We glanced at each other—two brief, polite recognitions that don’t add up to introductions—and then the bus arrived. She stepped up first, and I thought, without thinking it through, That’s the kind of person who goes first. Later I would learn that this was true and not true in ways that surprised me.
At dusk, she walked me to the bus stop. She folded her scarf over her mouth like a private endorsement and said, "I might be gone by morning." I nodded. We had both already known that the rhythm of things doesn't always keep people in one place. I wanted to promise something—continuity, a future message—but I am not a person of such promises. Instead I asked, "Can I call you sometime?" The phrase was out of place like a map dropped on a beach, but she accepted my number the way one accepts a folded map: carefully, as if it might crumple.
We spoke in fragments. Names—Naomi Swann—sounded like two seals on a jar. Mine felt clumsy by comparison. She said she was going to a residency; the word painted her as portable and temporary, a person who made rooms hers and then left them more interesting. I said I was going to teach a workshop; she asked what I taught, and the conversation refused to stop even though neither of us supplied more than thin verbiage.
"Call me if you get lost," she said.
I said yes.
