I couldn’t in the morning: I couldn’t in the night. I couldn’t on the
sun-dappled lake or among the empty rows of theater seats or on the Fourth of
July when the bright, distant explosions would have deadened my voice. I
couldn’t at your family’s cabin among the redwood trees you had played among,
the trees you had played among with your brothers as a child, or in the
moonlight of my great aunt’s crumbling courtyard, which smelled of gardenias
and jasmine she cut in the autumn for my grandmother Colette’s aromatherapy
shoppe. I couldn’t in your father’s den, where his trophies glowed in the
fireplace light like tiny golden sentries with stern, vigilant gazes.
In the final days of our favorite meeting place – a moss-blanketed hollow
now lost to real estate developers – where I imagined the charms of the natural
world were ours to keep; above the diving and dipping streets around the
Seattle Space Needle, where you first enchanted me with the poetry of Longfellow
and Emerson and your eyes, bright against your deep tan, were the epitome of
enthusiasm; in stillness of the cemetery, as I wiped salty tears from my pale
cheeks and smeared them over your casket and I whispered, “I should have told
you the truth,” I couldn’t.
[Note: This is a creative writing imitation exercise I did for my craft and theory class. The original text is an excerpt from a short story by Stuart Dybek entitled "We Didn't." The story appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1994 and thoroughly details the *ahem* unconsummated attraction of a young man to a young woman. I obviously took my excerpt in a different and much more melancholy direction. As for what it is that the narrator "couldn't" do... I have some ideas, but I'll leave that to the reader's imagination. Also, the awkward repetition of the word "among" in the first paragraph was a result of my attempting to emulate Dybek's use of repetition in the original excerpt.]
