By Annabel Moir Smith

I say she left me – really I should say that we left each other, but what does it matter, it was a hundred years ago. And whose sympathy is there left for me to earn? Certainly not yours.

It was really that I thought she was the best person I had ever known. And she was, for a time. She was brilliant and witty and lit by something that I wanted for myself. When we became bitter and vindictive towards each other I realized that I would never come to learn about the fiery tongues of cruelty and inscrutable need that burned inside her, not nearly as well as I had been forced to learn my own. It couldn’t have lasted much longer after that – the memory is unclear now, I apologize – but in my mind it feels like an eternity and I have to wonder why we kept it going for so long. I have always been so ashamed of my loneliness. In this instance I thought it would kill me. 

I lived in a small house by the lake. Do you know it? It dried up some time ago. It must have happened gradually, but I do not remember clearly the drying-up, only that one day I stepped outside my house to find that there was a dusty crater where it had once been so alive. 

Yes, that’s right, it would not have been a lake in your lifetime. Of course that is true, but it frightens me. I remember it so vividly. For the first several decades that I lived there it felt like a world of its own, as much of a world as I needed. The surface of the lake was the only mirror that I had, and I used to go out often and examine my appearance in the water. For years I kept expecting to grow old. I welcomed aging. In fact, I was impatient to outgrow my youth and settle into the evenness of old age, but I was never blessed with that. I am saddled with an abundance of things that I wish I understood. 

In the summers people used to come down to the lake and go swimming or canoeing, or sit on the banks and watch the frogs and fish among the reeds. Kids, mostly, but I would see couples sometimes, or older people that seemed as solitary as I was. Whenever anyone would go to the lake I would shut myself in my house and lock the door, but I would open all the windows and listen to their voices, their laughter, their quiet conversations. It made me happy. 

I do regret, at times, never going out to greet them. For many years I was so terrified that I would see her there, even though I desired it so strongly. It pained me to think that she was out living her life while I had quietly removed myself from mine. I had become so intrinsically tied to my solitude. I was embarrassed by how much it saddened me, frightened of how much I enjoyed it. 

I became petrified by the idea of seeing anyone. I felt as if making eye contact with another person would send me crumbling into dust. Even now, I am finding it difficult to meet your gaze. I have never been skilled at connecting with other people, even before I moved into the house by the lake a hundred years ago. I know that we have only just met but I have to admit I am afraid of losing you. I worry that the interest you express in what I have to say is only politeness and I will drive you away with some incommunicable quality of my personality. 

Something strange and wonderful happened this morning. I woke up and I felt old. My joints had begun to ache, and I felt a fatigue, a physical fatigue so distinct from the fog that I have felt myself in for such a long time. It was a joyful feeling. I felt a sense of readiness, that the time had finally come to face the world again. I know that life is meant to be a series of highs and lows, and there is no real satisfaction to be found, but it is my own fault that the high moments have been so fleeting and the lows so prolonged. You can only sustain yourself on the minutiae of those happinesses for so long. 

I left the lakeside for the first time in a hundred years today. I walked among the abandoned buildings, to the old park all filled in with concrete, the eerily quiet harbor. I was sad to see the state of my old town, but not terribly surprised. Even in my lonely life I have witnessed the slow destruction of things. The only real shock was the cemetery. I went to see if I could find her grave, and the entire plot had been razed down, was now a parking lot with scarcely any cars. That was what I was doing when you found me. I wanted to know, at least, that she was resting somewhere, since her death has been a vague sort of certainty for quite some time. I hope that it was peaceful and her life was fulfilling. I hope that she has been tortured with regret over losing me all this time. I wonder if she thought of me as she was dying, if it made her miserable, or sustained her for just a little bit longer. 

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Annabel Moir Smith is a student and writer from Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. Her fiction has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Bending Genres, Bright Flash Literary Review, Literally Stories, Eunoia Review, and others. She can be found on Instagram and Twitter at @annabelm_smith. She currently studies English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.