Postcard

He walked me out to my car. We embraced. I looked up at him with desperate eyes, the vulnerability of youth, like acid eating away at my finely crafted appearance. I even tipped up my chin in the hopes he might kiss me. His lips brushed haphazardly against my cheek. Seconds passed before my eyes opened, and I stood there on the driveway, next to my car watching him skip back towards the warm light of the party, the drunken voices escaping through the slightly open door. His last words hollered over his shoulder. “I’ll send you a postcard!”

Eleven years ago. The post card pulled from a box of memories full of shards of love letters, blurry pictures, creased and bent in places, drawing ragged white lines across a face, an arm, a foreign landscape. The stamp still folds over the top corner. It is a picture of the Scottish Highlands, velvety green mountains, crooked black rock, a clouded sky descending upon the landscape. The stamp is Portuguese. I imagine it hidden in the front zipper pocket of his backpack making its way across the English Channel, through the streets of Paris, the majesty of Northern Spain, and finally back into his hands in Albufeira, stamp licked, folded over top corner, and sent to me, worlds away.

Canadian snow. Footprints tracking a path through an everyday routine. Checking mailbox, waiting…

So few were the gestures, that I made monuments of every one. He hoped to find himself. I hoped that somewhere, drunk on cheap wine, beneath a street light in Hyde Park, or in a church made of bones in Prague, he might find me. A vision of my face manifested in a mixture of light and softly swaying leaves. My rosy seventeen year old cheeks filling out the form of a holy skull. I had never been there, to this landscape of self discovery known by most as the European Continent. But I imagined myself appearing, like a ghost, in every place I heard he had visited, reminding him of the love he had overlooked in his eagerness to seek out the self.

The patterning of expectation and emotion in my young self, was directed through a deceivingly strict regiment of typical romantic love, etched out in my subconscious by years of obsessing over historical romance novels and movies. I run my finger over the still gleaming laminate top of the postcard, trace the rigid lines that make up two cliffs in the foreground of the picture. I am lost in the image and soon imagining Mel Gibson running, kilted, across the highlands, and then there is his true love, her long ash brown hair caught by the wind, stray strands swirling across her angelic features. It was likely this idyllic image that festered beneath my plea,

Think of me in the dreary hills of Scotland.

I flip it over and see his handwriting, and remember attempting to decipher a hidden meaning behind every word. “Greetings,” he wrote, “from the land of dreariness.”
What followed was an account of “beautiful women, ugly men, and lots of laughs.” The only note of affection was his lopsided sign off. “Later babe,”

Years later I went on my own journey, yet still not entirely my own as it was a dramatic attempt to prove to him that I too, had a self. In Barcelona, sleeping quietly on the top bunk in the corner of a coed hostel, that really seemed more like a homeless shelter, was a young man who looked just like him. He wore white t-shirts, so white that the folds contrasted against the yellowing walls, just enough that I could make him out scurrying from bunk to bathroom, like a floating sheet. He kept to himself. Propped up on his bed, his back pressed into the wall, he fidgeted with his eye glasses from time to time, as he wrote in his journal, maybe even a few postcards. I kept watching him, seeing in his gestures, his loneliness, the man I loved.

But the feeling is no longer a feeling, but the memory of a feeling, long lost over a decade of experience.

I put the postcard back in the box, tuck it inside a birthday card and underneath a stack of photographs. Next time, I'll have to be digging to find it.