Unghosting

Dreams always trust the person they visit. They rely on us to understand — eventually — even if we don’t always do.

Off to the side, I also appeared, watching you from a distance, standing on the Lazzaretto banks. I watched and shouted — be careful. I watched and worried about the tide, slowly swallowing the last strand of grass between land and sea. I remember feeling oddly ashamed of my voice cutting the silence, like a knife.

I wanted to tell you that I don’t think about you anymore — that I forgot you, that you don’t mean anything to me now. That’s exactly what dreaming about you stood for: something I needed to acknowledge, something I was supposed to turn into something else — such as this letter. There are no pictures of you online, only an old work email on a website you haven’t updated in years, where a few of your abandoned photography projects linger. You used to like dark, somber colors. I always wondered if it was your way of posing as someone better than everyone else, better than me. Like your photographs, you were a serious, gloomy man, as if an entire world was buried inside you — thoughts you never shared because no one would have ever understood.

In the dream, I was unable to look into your eyes, just like what happens with the dead. Considering how things turned out between us, I thought it seemed perfectly coherent. After all these years, you’ve become a shadow whose outline I can barely discern.

When I woke up, I realized that I’d never seen your wrinkles. I can’t picture your white hair. I can only guess what you would look like today. In the dream, you were young and I was older. You were the man I once knew, while I was the woman I am now. The woman who, five years ago, gave birth to Alice, a blonde girl who looks like her father and cries a little too often.

You used to say I complained all the time. I don’t think it was true back then, but you said it so often that I started to believe it. I slipped into the role. My daughter will never know the girl I was before becoming her mother.

I wonder if another dream exists at your end, where you meet me as I’m young — my smooth face skin you used to brush with the back of your fingers, and yours rough and lined, very much like the skin you distractedly glimpse in the mirror every day. If that dream exists — if you ever had it — did I look happy?

Hadn’t you left that hotel room ten years ago, my daughter wouldn’t be here. Nor would this house I love, with its view over the rice fields and my studio in the attic, where I paint every day. There would be nothing of me and everything of you. That’s how our love worked: your plans, your dreams, your priorities. You occupied all the space, sucked all the air from my lungs until I was breathless. You told me you were going to Paris to get your things and speak to your wife. You never came back to Venice, even though you had promised to. And I — well, I just knew there was no point in chasing you.

One day, I will watch my daughter suffer over a man, and I will tell her, wisely, that it’s better to be the one who loves less — to avoid relinquishing her own breath. Or maybe I won’t. Perhaps I’ll keep it to myself. You’re not supposed to say such things about love, even if they’re true.

I haven’t dreamed of you once in the past ten years — but I did dream about you last night. You were looking for a ring, lost in a suspended world, which you came back to haunt like a ghost.

They say every attempt to map the salt marshes is bound to fail. They are shifting tongues of land, always hiding, constantly changing with the tide — yet somehow resisting, always reappearing. I tried to draw a map of you for a long time, as long as I have known you. Elusive and unyielding at once, I had a distinct image of you in my mind — until I tried to put it down on paper. It’s been many years, and I’m writing to tell you I have long forgotten you. That I never think of you. That I don’t even remember you. However, for this to be true, you have to believe me. You just have to.

* *

Lucrezia emailed the letter to the address she had found online, hoping it was no longer active: it was. Then she began her day just like any other. She loaded the dirty laundry into the washing machine and folded the dry clothes, tucking them into the drawers with greater care than usual. She climbed the stairs up to her attic studio, one step at a time, and resumed her work on the canvas — a composition of lilies of the valley that she hoped to finish by the end of the week. She spent a long time debating the yellow hues in the petals tucked into the background.

Around lunchtime, she went down to the kitchen and passed by the computer without turning it on. Even though she didn’t enjoy cooking, that day she decided to make a rustic pie, because she wanted to smell it baking. Late that afternoon, she sat on the couch with her husband and daughter, chatting about everything and nothing, waiting for dinner to be ready. Every now and then, her mind ran back to the letter she’d sent: the turns of phrase, the images she’d chosen to convey. No, she wasn’t thinking of him. She’d been clear on that. But the suitcase, the one in the storage room under the stairs—was it big enough? Would it look suspicious if she ever took it out without a reason? No, she wouldn’t go. He would never ask. And even if he did, she wouldn’t follow him. She had been clear from the very beginning.

Before bed, her inbox was still empty.

Later that night, in that hazy place between sleep and wake, she went back once more to the banks of the Lazzaretto, her gaze lost in the narrow canals of the salt marsh. The air was still and silent, and no one was around. A small, light blue glass ring, Lucrezia whispered to herself. Then she dove deep into the water to look for it.