In the car driving back to work I was listening to a cover of a song he used to sing once, when it came to me that you have to lose something three times before it’s really gone. The surety that accompanied this thought lent it a kind of truth, or the feeling of it, and of course I started to think about it.

The first time

This one is obvious; we said goodbye, and in that time goodbye was a forever thing. People travelled less, and they came in and out of your life like boats in a harbour. I left him at the westernmost edge of the country but I don’t remember how — sometimes in my memory it is in a cafe, other times in the square in front of the cathedral. Occasionally it is in the morning before he was awake, slipping out of the sheets quietly. It’s always me leaving, and in this memory sometimes I do not say goodbye at all.

The second time

He wrote letters, long ones; people did that too in that time. These were pages long and were probably funny because he was. He sent mixtapes and I used to love checking the PO box to see if there’d been a parcel delivered. When he sent them they would arrive only days after posting, whereas mine would linger somewhere over the ocean for two weeks or more. There was no reason for this but that it was how it was. I don’t remember anything they said now, nor the songs on the tapes, but I do know that in one he said ‘one man loved you in Spain once’. When I was packing to leave the place, I opened the dresser drawer where all the letters were, and threw them away. I would like to know why I did that, now.

The third time

This one came before the second, but time is elastic so it is the third nonetheless. He had given me a photograph of himself, the kind you have taken in a photobooth, people did that too, then. It was black and white, and when he gave it me I teased him that he looked as startled as a drowned man suddenly brought up from the bottom of the sea. Black and white it was, but you could see the blue of his eyes anyway. I kept it in my wallet until one day it was nicked from a coat pocket and I said three times that if who took it returns it there’ll be no consequences, you can keep the twenty dollars, I don’t mind. I was young enough then to think it might have done and when it did not return, that’s when I knew this was the third time I’d lost him, and sure enough the last one.

Black is the colour of my true love’s hair, that was the song, can you imagine ever being that young? But I was, once.