Dag sem nótt ég geng nú einn

And then, when you’re settled, you look at all the boxes that you neatly stacked on one side of this cubicle that you now call your room, and you start unpacking them, one by one. You sift carefully through all the contents, looking for something - anything - that would remind you of all the time spent with her. Oh, you have all the memories, but now, right now, right now in this very moment of time and space, you want - nay, you need - something tangible that you could hold or look at, but in the deepest pits of your stomach, you start to feel this sinking feeling - it’s not there. There’s nothing left. 

Boxes filled with clothes that don’t fit you, boxes filled with records you’ll never play, boxes filled with books you no longer want. And yet you continue, hoping against hope, that somewhere in the smaller boxes inside the bigger boxes you find proof that something escaped your culling. 

There are boxes filled with random assortments now, and in one you find a smaller orange box, and in it there’s a bunch of your pictures. You sit down on the floor, and you look at the pictures. There are pictures of your son’s mother, and of you when you were together. There are pictures of your son when he was a baby, and of when he was very young. Pictures of past loves, from almost twenty-five years ago, from twenty years ago, but nothing… not a thing of your time with her. And you question yourself, had the both of you even taken a single photo together? Maybe,  maybe not. Memory’s playing tricks with you. You could swear you did, but you can’t pinpoint a single moment in time where that might have happened. There were those photos of her she gave you, but you know full well where they ended up. And if you knew, then why the pretense? Why the need to feed your soul with hope you knew wasn’t there?

Because, and though reality, abject reality, will hit you in the face a thousand times over, you still cling to that elusive hope that maybe, maybe, something slipped through.

And it didn’t. It didn’t. All the boxes have been emptied, and you pick each one up, and you turn them upside down, empty them onto the floor, but the only things that fall are the tears that stream down your cheeks. Crying in the dark, in the sweet silence of the dark, is no stranger to you, and nor is feeling the biting cold in your naked flesh : still, you seek to punish yourself for what once was, still you think that you deserve the pain. You hope it numbs you, you hope it supersedes other aches. 

It’s time, now. The time has arrived, the ritual’s done. Nothing will ever change. Things are as they were meant to be - you are where you said you’d be - and against the chill of the closed window where you pressed your head to… you say her name. A sacred word, still, to this day. It escapes as a whisper, one no-one but you can hear. And you remember. You remember that which you never forgot. That which you will never forget. It is eternal, this feeling. And though you endeavour to ball it up and contain it deep inside you, you struggle to contain it. You place your fingers against the window, and in your mind, they reach out to hets, touching from a distance,