The Nightingale

If love is a disease, I suppose I’m infected.”

She wanted to remember him for as long as forever was.

“If times were different, I’d make you chase me,”

Wounds heal. Love lasts.
We remain.

“We will remind each other, oui? On the dark days. We will be strong for each other.”

“It’s not forgetting we need, Vianne,” he said, leaning down to kiss her. “It’s remembering.”

Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

If I had told him the truth long ago, or had danced and drunk and sung more, maybe he would have seen me instead of a dependable, ordinary mother. He loves a version of me that is incomplete. I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.

As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.