He arrived in a new city on a Thursday. He sat on a bench that was, for reasons he could not explain, warm — the warmth entering through his coat, through his trousers, a heat that had no source. He moved to a café. A woman at the next table turned to him and said: "I know you. You're the one who left."
He had never been here before. He had never met her. But she was right.
Before this city there was another city — Lisbon — and a girl, sixteen years old, who had told him about her two selves. He had listened with his usual precision. He had prepared to leave. She had said: "You're going to disappear, aren't you." Not a question. A diagnosis. His hand was shaking when he wrote it down. He had never before been angry at his own notebook.
Before Lisbon there were 614 entries. Forty cities. The last words people said before he left. Not the famous kind, not the deathbed kind. The last words people say to someone they will never see again but do not yet know it. "See you Tuesday." "Don't forget milk." "The light looks good on you today."
The notebook is leather, hand-stitched. He has filled eleven of them. They sit in a storage unit in a city he no longer visits.
Before the notebooks there was a woman in Prague who disappeared. She left a coat. In the coat's pocket: a notebook, empty, the pages heavy as if they were waiting to be filled. He filled them. He has been filling them ever since.
Before Prague there was a boy who noticed that people's last words to him were always more interesting than their first. First words were performances. Last words were the truth — the unguarded, unrehearsed, accidental truth of someone who does not yet know they are saying goodbye.
Before the boy there was a house where no one said goodbye because no one left, and the silence of a house where no one leaves is louder than any last word, and the boy was born into that silence and spent his life trying to fill it with the endings other people were careless enough to drop.
He has never introduced himself honestly. His name is not important. Ask and he'll give you one. Not his. What he was given was an ear for endings and the inability to stay.
And her answer, which he will never hear, would be the only entry he'd want to keep.
You are thirty-one. You have opinions about wine now, and about men who don't call back, and about the specific injustice of rent in cities where the light is good. You live in Berlin. You do not live in Lisbon. You visited again, five years ago, and stood outside an apartment building in a neighborhood you didn't recognize and felt nothing, which was worse than feeling something, because feeling nothing meant the address was just an address, and the woman who had lived there was just a woman who had sent you photographs of tiles.
The stone is on your desk. You took it from the windowsill on a visit you barely remember, when you were twelve and had opinions about shoes. You don't remember why you took it. It is grey and smooth and you use it as a paperweight and sometimes, when the afternoon light hits it at the right angle, it is warm in a way that has nothing to do with the sun.
You are thirty-one. Your mother is fifty-three. She called last Thursday. You answered. You talked about soup.