It's been three weeks since I saw Heart at the bar, apologised, gave her what will probably be the last gift to drift between us in our lifetimes. Two sketchbooks, full of hundreds of sketches, sketches that I charcoaled in like a madman the second after every time I saw her. If she was an addiction, then the sketches were my symptoms of withdrawal, pouring out from me like sweat or anxiety, a mixture that dictated the tides of my being. 

I still sketch her, though not as often. She's etched into my memory, shockingly vivid, optical searchlights always trained on every part of her, but she's harder to reach now. I can still feel the way that she used to kiss me sometimes, before long trips especially, when she would tug my bottom lip ever so slightly, like a child tugs its parents coattails.

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It's been three weeks since I saw Cam at the bar, and three days since I started calling him Cam in my head again. I'm not ready to see him. I focus not at all on what he looks like, or looked like when we were together, but rather what he sounded like. Tasted like. Cam was a felt experience for me, one that I navigated as if born blind, eyes closed with no perception of colour or light, and a heightened sense of what it was to feel and taste. 

The first of the notebooks is sitting in front of me. I'm by the window in a cafe that we never went to together. Too noisy, I can hear myself, on one occasion, admitting. Too loud, he would have said, nose crinkling and eyes laughing all the time. And it is noisy. Loud. But I'm here because I have to forget the audial. Forget the strained nausea in his voice from three weeks ago, and forget how he smelled in the morning, skin warm, after we woke up in bed together. Forget the felt, and focus on the visual. 

The notebook is rough in my hands. It's a notebook that has been on many journeys, has sat on many coffee-stained tables, has passed through many pairs of hands, or perhaps the same pair of hands many times. I can feel my heart beating through my hands, through the notebook as if it itself were alive and had a truth to tell. I'm terrified to open it. It's Cam, after all. If anything, Cam always knew how to surprise me in the most wonderful--and then in the end--the most compromising of ways. 

Heart in a frenzy, pun intended, I flip open the notebook. There's an inscription that would be quiet if spoken aloud: To my Heart, on the day of our first wedding anniversary. Written February 3rd, 2016. 

My hand is immediately at my mouth to stifle the sobs that come up and are already stifled by the deafening sound that I hear all around me. I am sobbing, automatically, from grief and regret and remorse at the situation we are in that was catalysed by the other situation--yes, the one that happened almost two months ago. 

I can't do this, I think, crazily, it's not time. I'm not ready. 

My thoughts are stream-of-consciousness, riding the flow of every heartbeat. I'm lying to myself and I know it. I am ready to see the contents of the sketchbook, whether or not they are blank beyond the first page, torn, bloody, ripped out and wrung like a fish eaten directly from the sea. I wouldn't be sitting in the overly populated café otherwise. 

I immediately scan the words of the first page another time. To my Heart, on the day of our first wedding anniversary. Written February 3rd, 2016. It is psychotic, that date. A month before we first met, when he sat down in front of me at the library on March 3rd, 2016. And before that the words are psychotic, too, exacerbated even further by the improbability of the date's truth. No, not by the date's truth, but by the date's believability, or un-believability, depending on how well you know Cam. 

The second page. 

A sketch of me--no, make that an idealised version of me--head bowed at the library, studying. My hair, shorter than it's been for four years, hangs in whips and gasps across my cheeks. The charcoal is perfectly preserved, as if the drawing was finished and immediately looked away from, enclosed between the book's pages until the moment I was allowed to unearth it. 

The next several are the same sort of fashion, sketched hurriedly, guiltily, and then turned immediately away from in favour of the next. I skip the pages, feeling decidedly vacuous, until the very end of the book. It's a sketch of me, but not the same me as before. A me that I would recognise in the mirror if sketch-me and me-me were placed side by side or interchanged in front of a mirror. The style is developed. I can tell that in the end, I have become a well-loved subject of his, one that he's sketched thousands of times, obsessively, and is still captivated with an act of documenting the passing moments, the ones that change an angle of her head, raise her eyebrows in an unexpected way, move the light around in her eyes. It's a subject that's been drawn in the margins of notebooks, hidden in galleys and in public telephone booths, mused over but never erased. 

I go back a page, captivated. 

And it is no longer just me--it's us. I can tell that it's him by the curve of his jaw, and the painstaking exactitude of his 5 o'clock shadow, the very one that I thought was unbearably sexy on him but always told him was otherwise because I was too embarrassed to admit it, the very one that he knew, somehow, that I thought was unbearably sexy because he said he could tell by the way I kissed him, and the very one that would appear, assiduously and unmistakably, when he wanted me to spend the night buried in his arms, when he had an admission or apology to make. In the drawing we are pulled closely together in a passionate kiss, chins tilted slightly away from the perspective of the picture, almost as if the frame were a camera and we were embarrassed by the paparazzi in front of us. 

And the most absurd part of it all is that of course we would have been embarrassed. 

I am mature enough to know that the heartbreak of a first love is always the worst, especially if it comes so late as 25 and makes you wish the world were a fire that could be put out so that you could just doze a while and forget. 

I can't forget, Cam, but I can forgive.