Lauren Fath

How to Leave Without Saying Goodbye

a cross fading.

—Kevin Young, “I Shall Be Released”

In pre-pandemic January, when the future feels as easy as clouds breaking, you invite her to brunch at a corner café near the Santa Fe Plaza. Waiting for a table, you stand outside in the elliptical winter light, two stretched shadows merging. Contrails cross and fade overhead. They have always beckoned to you, these remnants of flight—the way they preserve movement, the way they let something disappear more slowly than it actually has.

Sidewalk sun soaks your wool coat as you skim headlines in a row of newspaper boxes. The virus has not yet made the front page. Next to you, she shivers despite layers of outerwear, a knit hat, ski gloves. She is always cold, you will learn, always bundled up against something—love, the weather. Even when you’re seated in the crowded restaurant, windows steamed from the heat, she doesn’t take off her zip-up fleece. But she becomes less guarded, talking about her California childhood, her work at the national lab, her breakup six months ago, kindness as the principle she lives by. “Always kindness,” she says, sliding eggs-over-medium onto her fork. You believe her, though you know well enough that she hides behind a curtain of sarcasm and straight, austere hair, behind angular glasses that sharpen her expression.

You save the receipt from this brunch in your wallet. You hope it will become a memento of how you started, of the beginning of something. What is it called when you harbor nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened? It’s like missing a city you’ve only flown over. “Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances,” Robert Hass writes, the line that has become your refrain, that would be your tattoo if you weren’t afraid to get one. Yet you can’t figure out why you long for something that has barely begun, something tinged with danger for reasons far greater than the icy highway, fifty-four miles between her Santa Fe home and your tiny mountain town. What if you are jet trails that never intersect, parallel plumes of vapor that vanish without touching?

You hike together on the Chamisa Trail outside Santa Fe, through a foot of snow in the shade of ponderosa pines, through mud where the sun-scattered ground has thawed. You sit on a cluster of warm, mossy rocks and share your packed lunches. She extends her hand—kindness, always kindness—as you scale the banks of Tesuque Creek, its fast, frigid tongues lapping at your boots. You follow her lead over packed-down ice and gravel. Tree limbs break and fall to the ground, succumbing to decay and gravity. Nothing disappears, though; it just changes form. “The snow makes everything quieter,” you say. “That’s because water molecules absorb sound,” she replies—an engineer’s logic—without breaking her long-legged stride.

A week later, the pandemic still just news from overseas, you meet up in Santa Fe’s Railyard, where the two of you share tapas arrayed on porcelain plates, sip white wine and whiskey. Through the window behind her, you watch pedestrians duck their hooded heads against the wind. You talk of your running routines, of why neither of you has tattoos (commitment, she says; pain, you say), of loss—the relationships you can’t quite let disappear. You like the way she rests her chin in her palm while she listens, how she brushes her hair out of her eyes, her slender wrists, the slight slouch in her posture. As you’re leaving, she holds up your coat so you can slide into it, then offers you a ride back to your hotel, even though it’s just up the street. Kindness. Always kindness. You will save the receipt from the restaurant, called Paloma—dove, in Spanish—tuck it into the paper sleeve with the Hilton room key. The after-dark drive up I-25, over a winding mountain pass, felt too risky. You couldn’t have known that what was about to happen was a risk far greater.

Walking to her car on narrow, streetlight-sepia sidewalks, she wraps her elbow around yours, leans her head into your shoulder. Was it the weather or affection? You don’t ask, but you also know that she is always cold. She parks under the hotel awning, under the saffron heat lamps intended for valets and bellhops, in plain view of anyone coming and going, though no one walks by at this late, star-specked hour. As you’re about to get out of her car, you hug for too long before she kisses you on the lips, quickly. “Yes or no?” she asks. Yes.

“We’ve been idling for thirty minutes,” she says when you’ve stopped kissing, when you’ve unlaced your fingers from her hair. Her words cut through the warm breath of the car’s vents, through your guilt about sitting so long, engine running. She could not have known, then, that idling would so soon become a way of life, no longer an indulgence but a necessity. As you step into the late-winter dark, your clothes and neck lose traces of her perfume to the wind—a reminder of what is already lost, a reminder against remembering her face, illuminated by the dashboard so that you catch only the dim-lit edges of her regret as she pulls away.

She calls the next morning to say this is done before it has begun. You sit cross-legged on your hotel bed, paging through an art gallery guide as she talks about how she’s not ready. Through the sliding glass doors, you watch the man who cleans the Hilton pool move around its perimeter with his long-handled net, fishing for leaves even though it’s winter and there are few, if any, that haven’t already fallen. You know the warning words, “I just can’t,” before she says them, the way you see planes before their sound shudders around you. You are two jet trails intersecting, the memory of their flight paths floating away, fading. But contrails do not disappear; they just change form, ice melting into the sun-splintered sky.

You’d always loved flying, that suspension between here and there, the way time shifts beneath you. When the pandemic has made the front page, when idling has become a way of life, you will look up and wonder why those planes remain in the sky, empty vessels winging stubbornly, as if they had a destination.

Lauren Fath is the author of My Hands, Remembering: A Memoir (Passengers Press, 2022) and the lyric essay chapbook A Landlocked State (Quarterly West, 2020). Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Gertrude, High Desert Journal, and Post Road, among others, and has received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She lives in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where she is an associate professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University. Her favorite sweet is mayonnaise cake, which sounds disgusting but is a scrumptious chocolate cake recipe passed down from her maternal great-grandmother.