Phil’s only here when the begonias are in full bloom. He comes up this lane like it’s his and not mine, pedalling and out of breath. I welcome him because I’m out of breath from waiting for him. He says ‘Hey, has it been long?’ and my response is always that I’ve already forgotten the wait.
Phil brings spring with him, holding its hand and leading it to my door. I turn the doorknob and blossoms of lavender greet me; it’s almost like he never went away at all, when really I’ve waited for months now.
Phil never stays long. People take pieces of you when they go, wherever they go. I remember standing metres from him as he hung from the tire swing in my backyard. I was left speechless at his request to have some of my heart in a jar to take with him. I watched him smile and sat on the rusting bicycle he always brought with him. He took my heart in pieces and I watched him, felt his lips touch my cheek.
Phil once said my hair was his type, soft and gentle as it lay over my brow. His was dark, and while I had no patience for the numbers in the classroom, my mind seemed to embrace astronomy and the dark matter that came with it. He had always had dark hair, the black of it soaking up all the surrounding colours, and it was beautiful. I’d never felt prouder of the way my messy hair looked than in that moment he said he thought it made me handsome.
I can almost see him going down the driveway. The begonias are leaving wilting pieces in his wake. He’s up on his haunches, shoulders raised over his head and body bent over the metallic structure. His legs move; the act is languid, and rain hits him as if it’s waited all this time for his departure. I never forget this picture.
And Louise tells me Phil is not good for me. It’s not normal, she says, how Phil sends me into a week-long frenzy when he goes. Louise looks at him with some disgust and I try my best to outline the way Phil is my high-school romance, the queen at the promenade. My words fail me and Louise is scalding with hers on how I’ve lost the spice in my tongue, the dimples to my smile. Louise says I’ll have no colour left if I keep giving it all to Phil.
We have lunches together, Louise and I, and she’s doing something else in this government school; what it is I can’t exactly tell you because I can’t remember. The other seasons never stay with me, I only have a memory of Phil’s gentle breaths bringing spring and a question regarding why he left looking for colour and always returned to me.
Pathetic? Quite. An option? No, a requirement. I keep waiting.
“He’s drinking the life from you, Dan.”
“No he’s not, Louise. Go away.”
It smarts, that I know what Louise is saying. I can feel the life going, but I don’t miss it. I miss Phil, and maybe I don’t want to know why it’s been two years since he visited. I still have keys under my door-mat and a brass bell outside. Louise says it’s Santa I’m waiting for and that he was declared a myth long ago.
The world chugs by on a speeding bullet-train. I’m still sitting on my porch with the job applications empty and overdue. If I look hard enough, maybe there’ll be a boy in tight jeans and blue eyes bringing spring back. It hasn’t been here since he left.
We put begonias in my garden to make spring last after he’s gone. When he made off in the morning the flowers fell to a side, like they wished to be uprooted and taken with him.
Phil often left me behind when the cars came around and his bike was too old to keep up. I kept the thing and polished it so it shone even when the sun wouldn’t come out.
“Stop waiting,” Louise scolds, “he’s not coming back. Even if he does, he’ll only run again and return when things are bad with him and good with you. You’re not a cheap motel, Dan.”
“You bring me life,” Phil had once told me.
I wanted to say the same then, but I didn’t know if I was getting life from him or growing unhealthily accustomed to how he sucked life from me. I told him I loved him, however, and he smiled at that like it would sustain him for another month since I did.
Louise shows up at my door again and sees my eyes darken when it isn’t Phil ringing the bell. It isn’t Louise’s bell, it’s Phil’s. Everyone knows that the yellow umbrella is Phil’s and the bell is his to sound when he arrives.
“You sure you won’t go on the road-trip?” Louise asks, “It’ll be fun!”
“I have a boss to answer to, Louise.”
It’s true. I do, only he’s been telling me to let off some steam and take a break from all that coffee-drinking and overtime. The cubicle keeps my thoughts in. It’s not spectacular, but it has photographs of the outside world tacked to its walls and that makes everything better. Doesn’t it?
“You’re afraid you’ll miss him if he comes around. It’s been years.”
“I’m not afraid I’ll miss him. He’ll give me a ring if he comes back.”
Louise looks like she wants to run a stake through me. We both know Phil is not contactable by any means. He isn’t in the phone-books or the registries. It’s almost like he’s too dear for the monotony of this world and its columns. Phil refuses to be shoved into any box or confined to cold font on thin pages.
“You’re much more than him, Dan.”
“Am I?”
“You can be.”
“I don’t want to; he colours everything.”
It’s the first time I actually see his name on paper when a notice arrives at my door. I don’t know how they’ve managed to put his name down or send this to my address. When his full name stops by it’s not him; it’s a mail-man and a notice that flutters by in my hands, waiting to be lost in the wind.
“I didn’t know they’d look for him,” Louise looks almost disappointed that there is news, “they seemed almost nonchalant that he stayed out late and never returned sometimes.”
“They’re his parents,” I say, “so they should care if he’s missing, Louise.”
I care. I always have, so why should this be any different?
“He would’ve told me.”
“Open your eyes, Dan.”
“They’re wide open.”
“He doesn’t want you anymore, Dan; he’s had his fun and now he’s going. He was never going to stay. You were never going to marry or sit together at sixty-three. He’s not that kind of boy, Dan.”
We look at the paper in resignation. While the outbursts were to be expected, this feeling of closure is odd. Maybe it was waiting at my door all along.
“It’s like the physical manifestation of what he’s been all along, you know,” Louise runs her hand through her hair and tries to stop the tears as they fall, “missing. They say you’re gone if it’s been three months or more, but Phil was gone from the moment he walked into the classroom, Dan.”
“Was he?”
Like a ghost that navigated the hallways, Phil had slipped through school. And now he slips through my fingers like receding waves that can’t hug a shore for fear it’ll disappear under their arms. Phil loved me; I can be sure of that, though it may have been a second’s worth of his attention.
I hold the missing-person notice in my hand and I look down the driveway again, leaning past the Jeep in the way. There isn’t a boy riding up on a bike with the ease of spring. So he isn’t here.
“He never loved us, Dan. It wouldn’t have worked out.”
“But the bushes, Lou. Look at them.”
Louise looks. The flowers have returned and the high-school portrait in black and white remains in my grasp. The reds bloom and blossom and run up the tendrils around the pots in my garden again. I can feel him coming in the spring winds, like the other three seasons cease to exist in the majesty of his unnamed one. Some things are too dear for this place, I think, and maybe Phil is one of them. He’s only here to wave goodbye.
I kiss Louise on the cheek and run upstairs to pack a dusty haversack with clothes and line it with rolls of cash. There is one last thought in my head: if I go now I may miss him. I bend out of my window and the reds are still there; Phil is waiting with his salutations. My eyes go past the begonias and settle on Louise, who stands outside my window like she’s waited for me to grow up as long as I’ve waited for Phil.
Behind her daisies are coming up from the ground. The begonias are going now, and it looks like I’m going too.
