How beautiful is it to have loved and to have lost?
How beautiful is it to have seen the winter yield to spring
To see the moon kiss the sun goodbye?
How beautiful is it to experience life
at it’s fullest
at it’s worst
and to have lived to tell the tale?
I remember our love story through a series of things.
The first thing that you gave me was a drawing. Scribbled in the margins of my notes, insignficant in theory, but boundless in reality. It was a figure, one that I didn’t know, maybe one that you had made up in that head of yours, maybe one that came from one of the many shows that you loved and I don’t think I’d ever me able to understand. I remember that I tried so hard to get you to notice me, enough to give me an insignificant drawing.
“What is this,” I whispered to you, hidden in the third row from the professor, the words passing like secrets whispered in the dark.
“Don’t worry about it,” you responded, coy, cheeky, like it was a joke maybe we could share. Maybe it was a joke I’d have to learn.
And learn I did, memorizing the slope of pen lines, the shading of the dark ink, how you made the time figures come to life on the page. I created stories, lifes for the characters, doing the same for us, envisioning the life that we could have together, higlighted by the doodles in margins. I remember the taste of the ink of my tongue, as I ran the muscle over the indents in the paper, tasting the ink, your soul. The twang of wood fibers, soggy in the cavern of my mouth, a thick lump as it passed down my esophagus. The ink covering the page painting a cavern inside of me.
The second thing that you gave me was a packet of tea. I was sick on the day that you did. It was a “favor between friends” you said. I pretended not to hurt at the word. I pretended that a deep ache didn’t settle in my stomach at the word, a vast pit, deep in my sorrow. But my heart was happy, that you had gone out of your way to get something just for me.
I remember running into you on that sunny day, just as you had managed to acquire the box of tea.
“Thank you,” I told to you, the words almost breathless as they escaped my lips.
“Don’t worry about it,” you said, “I was already on my way to the store.” But the box, a treasure in a world full of trash, in my favorite flavor just like a told you, prized to me more than anything else in the world.
I remember when I steeped the tea, it was the first thing that I had the next morning before my taste buds were tainted with the flavor of anything else, how the flavor erupted over my taste buds, the faint notes of honey being drawn out, complementing the peppery flavor of the ginger. The best tea I had ever tasted in my life, incomparable to anything steeped by man. I savored the warmth that it brought to my body, the relieving of sickness, and the way it began to fill the chasm in my stomach.
Now, I refuse to drink the tea unless you’re the one buying it for me.
The last thing that you gave me was a letter.
I gave you one too,
I remember that I hung it on my walls, among my posters and postcards, it making a space there just as you had in my heart.
I remember that I hung it on my walls just as you had hung mine on yours.
I remember running my fingers over the creases, dutifully trying to flatten out the ridges that interrupted your love (letter). I remember sticking it with tape, I refused to use a tack lest I struck a hole through the words, the ink, your soul, covering the page.
Now there is a gap on my wall, a crack in my heart from where the note used to hang. The chasm in my soul cried, sobbed in the absence of your love.
So in ten years, when you find another life,
maybe another love
maybe experience another loss
I want you to remember the things that you gave me.
More importantly,
I want you to remember that you’ll never be able to fill the gaps of the things that I will always keep.
Writer | Mackenzie Dunson ’25 | mdunson25@amherst.edu
Editor | Sally Jang ’27 | yjang27@amherst.edu