The Anatomy of Being Forgotten
Movement I — The Gradual Departure
We still used each other’s names
the way one uses a key:
without looking at it,
without remembering the door.
At first, absence was only a change in weather—
your voice arriving later from another room,
then later still from another habit,
until I mistook your silence
for the ordinary sound of a house.
I learned the grammar of your turning away:
the small mercy of later,
the cautious weather of fine,
the way a question can be answered
without ever being received.
Once, your name was a room I could enter
with my eyes shut.
Now it is a word I pronounce carefully,
as if it belonged to someone
who had once lived here
and left no forwarding address.
We did not fall out of love
so much as fall out of practice.
Love became a language neither of us
bothered to keep alive—
its verbs weakening first,
then its nouns,
then the names.
You still knew how I took my tea.
I still knew which window you opened
when the room became too warm.
But knowing is not the same as reaching.
A map can remain accurate
after the country has changed.
One evening I said your name
and you turned, politely,
the way strangers turn
toward a sound they have decided
not to be responsible for.
We had not lost each other
in a single catastrophic leaving.
We had become two names
spoken in the same house—
each carrying a person
the other could no longer find.
– Ashwin Sicily Muringathery