With my lover in my bed, I’d often find myself drifting down the dimly lit side streets, captivated by the way the moonlight washed over the tops of the buildings. With my lover in my bed, I’d often find myself staring down the empty bottle of wine, feeling it dance in my blood, in my mind, feeling the thought of her dancing with it.

I stood for a moment in the foyer, the bluish hue of the night bleeding onto everything, almost greedily. I ran my hand along the wallpaper, which had begun to peel in long strips, breaking up the pattern sporadically. I felt my breath slow, and deepen. I could feel the late hours starting to wear on my head and my eyes. 

July had flowed down the stream, and August was seeming to slow things down. The air was gentle, almost careful in the way it shook hands with my skin as I stepped out through the screen door. My feet fit loosely into my leather shoes, which I had slipped on quietly in the corner of the room, hoping Hazel wouldn’t wake. She had been lying with the sheet covering the lower half of her body, but the duvet passively pushed off to the side. I watched her for a moment while she slowly turned her body away from the window, the moonlight shining in, making her features illuminate with a gentle glow. I slid open the window to let some air in. I pulled the curtains too. I kissed her cheek.

The grass had begun to wilt under the creeping morning dew that accompanied the falling moon. In the corner of the yard, under the arching and sagging leaves of the willow tree, there sat a small cast iron table, and a set of chairs, with its coat of white paint weathering away. The same set that Hazel and I had bought from a yard sale, where we used to share tea from time to time. I unlocked the fence gate and stepped out onto the street, which sat in a grave silence. If I stood especially still, almost nothing could be heard. Occasionally, I’d catch a creak from one of the old houses, or the sound of leaves talking with the wind. 

In the late hours of the night, my mind often felt as though it began to slip through the cracks. Memories, thoughts, all blended together, and time fled faster than I could follow. When I tried to remember Hazel, for some reason I couldn’t. Her face seemed to blur and mix with the color of her hair, with the color of the sheets, with the color of the moonlight. These nights, as they faded into the early dawn, often ended with my back against the wall on the church steps. Often with my head laying to rest in the palms of my hands. 

It's there that I felt nothing short of cowardly. Hiding away, in the shadow cast under the awning, I’d read the letters she wrote to me. I’d run my hands over the words one by one, looking for something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’d feel the air pick up, the smell of rain fresh from hours before suddenly making itself known. I’d feel my heart beat inside my arms, my legs, my head. My vision would blur. On familiar nights like these, when she had come back to visit, I couldn’t help but feel sick. Not an illness. More of a nostalgic tug deep in my stomach. Something that would whisper in my ear that no matter how close she gets, she’ll never be anything but far away.  

I’d spend months writing to her, filling my brain with thoughts about being with her, wearing her smell on my clothes, hearing the memory of her voice as she decided whether she’d want peaches or cherries from the farmers market. Hearing her breaths rise and fall as she’d lie sleeping against me. I’d spend months laying out photos of us together, walking to the store for frames, so that I could hang them all over the stained walls. I could hang them and cover the peeling decay of the wallpaper behind, bleached from the years of sun that washed through the window. The wallpaper that reminded me that we were apart.

But when the glass turned over, the time having dripped slowly out, and I’d helped Hazel inside with her bags, and embraced her tightly, I found that it became too difficult to face her endurings head on. I felt as though I wanted to sit alone in the back garden. Not because I didn’t love her. Not because I didn’t want to see her. But because the reality of what she was facing–an illness that was consuming her, withering her body away, taking the light of flourishing life and snuffing it out–was something far too harsh for me to face head on.  

I first met Hazel in a rural part of Georgia, where she bagged goods at the local grocery store. Her hair had been dyed with streaks of blonde, but her natural color was brown. It flowed from her like tea that flows from the pouring of a kettle: gracefully, carefully, as though every strand had a specific place. Her eyes glittered with a deep green, partially illuminated from the lights that hummed overhead. Partially because she had some way about her. A large sweater swallowed her body, with her apron clumsily wrapped around it, and a nametag with brightly colored letters clipped to the corner. I found myself doing rounds in the vegetable aisle to catch glances at her. I found myself thinking of the way the color of her eyes matched the small ferns that grew out behind my childhood home. I found myself lying awake at night, thinking of her. 

She donated her smile to every passerby, there was always so much of her to go around. She was plentiful, and never afraid to take up space. It seemed that the light from the sliding front doors shone down onto her like a spotlight. What little I remember of that time is of her. What little I think of these days, is of her.

I wasn’t born in Georgia, or anywhere near it. I grew up in a northern part of Vermont, where the clouds rolled across the skyline, casting long shadows as the days drew to an end. But I found myself there after packing what little I owned, and heading south in search of the sun. In search of a place where a river runs through, slow and steady. Finding one where the steeple stands tall against the sky, and the moon lays lowly next to it. An unrequited town, left behind by the wake of an industry’s boom. A place, like me, waiting to be wanted again. 

I started work at the pharmacy on the corner of Main Street, ringing up customers and unloading the truck when it came by with new deliveries. The owner, Victoria, who was much kinder than she should have been, needed somebody to rent her small cottage on the edge of town, and I bought it off of her a few years later. The pharmacy usually closed earlier than the grocery store, so I’d often close up and wait for a bit out back to make it seem like I wasn’t rushing over there at the same time every day. I’d lean up against a couple of stacked boxes and light a cigarette, taking a long drag, watching the cars roll slowly by, and the sun spill over the horizon as it set. Some days, I hoped Hazel would get off of work early, and catch me standing out there. Maybe she’d think I was interesting. Or profound. 

On one rainy June day, where the clouds seemed indecisive, parting and returning again and again, I made my way over to the grocery store after a longer shift. This was a few months after I had drifted into town, and I wasn’t entirely sure what time it was, but I had missed the sunset. I caught Hazel on her way out. 

“Sorry Mister, you just missed us.” she said, looking gently at me. I could feel the way her body relaxed a bit, seeing a face that she recognized. We had talked a few times before, but mostly just in passing conversation as she rang up my groceries. 

“Oh, I, uh, I must have lost track of the time.” I said. “I was just hoping to grab some things to cook dinner.” I was lying. I had nothing in mind, I was just stopping by to see her. 

“I-” she looked around. “I can let you in, it's no big deal. You’re-Andrew? From the pharmacy?” she said. She turned around towards the doors and started to unlock them, letting me inside and following behind. 

“Yeah, I work across the street. Sometimes those shifts run late,” I said. The grocery store was completely dormant, like it had been frozen in time. The aisles were dark, save for the light that scattered from the freezers in the back. There was a soft hum from the air conditioning overhead. Hazel had lifted herself up, sitting on top of the conveyor belt at the register, watching me as I walked from aisle to aisle, grabbing a near random assortment of items. Eventually, she started to ring me up.

“So when are you gonna talk to me?” she said, catching me a bit off guard. She stopped what she was scanning and looked up towards me. I could have sworn her eyes had suddenly deepened in color. 

“Sorry?” I replied.

“Y’know, you come by here at the same time every day. I see you looking at me. You clearly make one too many loops around the vegetable aisle. I figured you would actually talk to me by now. Y’know, more than a bit of small talk at the register.” She looked back down, continuing to scan. 

So we talked. About where we grew up. About what we wanted to do with our short lives. About the books we read. The people we loved. And I kept stealing looks at her eyes. And we kept talking. From there, we leaned until we fell into one another. She became everything, an all-encompassing lens through which I now looked. A dance, slowly, but intentionally, shifting the weight back and forth between each foot. Leaning into her. Her, leaning into me. A waltz.

After a few months, she moved in, folding herself into the cottage as she had into me, quiet and certain, as if she had always been there. We drove a town over to a bigger market so that we could buy things to bring it to life, to make it ours. A new rug. A set of curtains. A soft, cream wallpaper, with a delicate design.  

The night fell to an end, my mind still blurred. Thoughts of Hazel, mixed and pooled inside of my head. I stood now in the middle of the street, looking at the boxes stacked behind the pharmacy, where I had once stood so many years before. Victoria eventually sold the pharmacy to a larger company, and moved back with her family out west. With her, my job went as well. But by then I had found other work. 

I had no cigarettes on me, no jacket, just my keys and Hazel’s letters. I started to make my way up the road, back towards our cottage that sat on the edge of town. I watched as my weight shifted between each step. How my thoughts seemed to sway with the movement of my body. The world around me had started to make itself known. The birds and the bugs hummed with the early morning, their harmony threading through the cracks of open windows. My mind began to settle, and with it, the thoughts of Hazel did too, soft as dust, certain as sunlight. 

I opened the gate, remembering the willow tree as it had been just hours before; now, it scattered the light that shone through it into the yard. The window of our bedroom remained open, the curtains still pulled. I let myself in, setting my keys on the table and standing perfectly still in the foyer. The wallpaper remained, peeled at the edges. It had been weathered, fading into something that was now closer to a yellow. It reminded me of the color of Hazel’s teacups. Soft footsteps stirred from the back room.

About two years after Hazel and I started seeing each other, she got sick. Her cough was constant, her body becoming frail and small, almost as if she was being consumed from the inside out, unrecognizable from the person she once was. She spent days laying in the back room, but saw no signs of improvement. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. Neither could she. I carried her to my car one morning, and drove into Savannah. We had no hospitals around here.   

We found out soon after that Hazel had to be transferred to a clinic in Kentucky. I told her that I would visit as often as I could. She told me the same. I felt selfish, for not wanting her to leave. But I watched as she struggled to walk out to me in the waiting room of the hospital. I struggled, watching the once vibrant color of her eyes fade.  

As quickly as I had found myself fluttering into town, Hazel found herself leaving. The house became empty, quiet, lonesome. Her smell faded as I washed the sheets. My infatuation for her and the time that we had together became suddenly disproportionate. As the final few days fell through my hands like grains of sand, she became the sound of the distant, constant, waves. The days had started to stretch longer, and I spent most of my evenings alone in the backyard, under the willow, writing, for her. Some were poems about the days that we first met. Some were letters that I’d send each morning. Some were just entries for myself, trying to make sense of our separation. I worried that I didn't consider her enough. That I made everything about myself.

The bedroom door opened and Hazel stood, leaning against the frame. She wore nothing but an oversized blue t-shirt. Her hair was messy, and full. She looked at me, and her eyes deepened. 

“I missed you this morning,” she said, softly. 

She was tender, delicate. Her body had begun its process of restoration. She still was stuck doing treatment in Kentucky, but she looked nothing as she did during those days. Hazel always had life, flowing through her, like the moonlight did through the parted curtains she had picked out. Like the sunlight that the willow had scattered into the yard that we shared. Like tea being poured from the kettle: gracefully, carefully. Like the wallpaper clinging to the wall, softening from the sun, refusing to let go.