she broke his heart, and so he did the only thing that a love-sick, heart-broken fool could do:

he left the country.

he took the bus down south, through mexico, stopping and working in small villages when he needed money enough to get to the next vilage.

he stayed, fr awhile, in one, because of a girl who made him dance.

she had grabbed his hand, led him to that squared off, clean dirt area roped with soft blue lights, and made him dance.

and so he stayed with her, in her room, in her parent's house, and she was passionate and dark, beautiful and smelled like some flower he couldn't name.

for whatever reason, she loved him.

but he still thought of the other one.

there were tears, slaps by her, blood drawn by fingernails both during fights and sex, and the sex, it was heated.

she made love to him in the rain, the first time that had happened to him, pushed down into the mud in the clearing three acres behind the rough barn raised years before her birth.

he moved on.

kept going south.

there was that one night stand in the dirty hotel room filled with flies and rats, if you turned the lights off.

he kept moving.

and she never left his mind. he would wake up, on a bus moving down a thin road, and over the hum of the tires she would speak, her voice would melt, and at the next stop he would get off, find some cheap home made wine and wake up three days later, poorer than the wine cost him.

then there was that month, in the village on the cliff, that he wasted, drunk every day. a woman, a mother of three small boys, took pity on him and sheltered him.

but he barely remembers this. it is more like some foggy dream, some half memory glimpsed from the corner of an eye, a story he begins telling and only realizes, midway in, that the story might just be true.

he woke up on a boat sailing to europe. in the worst of his drunken stupor she made him sign to work the boat, to cook and clean and sober up.

it took weeks to get to europe. he would spend the days doing whatever someone told him to do, cleaning the grease off the grill, mopping the floors, brushing the toilets. as long as it kept him solitary he did it.

those nights he would spend on deck, watching the sky, listening to the motors and the passenger's laughter until he fell asleep.

then he found himself in europe. they landed on the coast of spain. he took his earnings and began moving across the land, found another ship that took him to italy. venice he wandered, sleeping sometimes in empty gondalas abandoned at night.

he made friends with one gondaler who introduced him to his sister.

she was soft and innocent, reminded him of the cotton fields that grew roadside at his home.

but she wanted more than he could give her. she wanted a family and a house, a husband who was legal and settled.

at night she would waken to find him standing at their window, looking out at sky, his shoulders tense and his bottom lip bitten.

they never spoke about the love he had for that girl he wasn't even sure existed anymore.

the girl that chased him to here, the girl that kept him awake. he didn't want to hurt this new girl, didn't want to lose again, and so he proposed to her.

and they married inside an old whitewashed church with the windows open and the smell of honeysuckle near the altar. she had learned how honeysuckle struck a deep chord in him and had spread liquid on the floor for the ceremony.

and he knew he cared deeply for her, but it wasn't the same. and she loved him. and they were happy, save for the nights he was found at the window and she led him, by the hand back to bed, to have him slowly enter her and move, almost languidly, until she cried out, once, and collapsed, searching for breath.

and they lived for this five or six years, peaceful, quiet. he learned to make furniture and though nothing he created was beautiful, it was sturdy.

and he began to write again.

slowly, as he shaved the wood smooth, he would create stanzas in his head, couplets that matched his heartbeat.

she died.

it was sudden, a weakened heart giving out. the house was so empty after that, the fridge full of food she liked, the vases full of flowers, wilting, she had grown herself.

three weeks after the funeral he found himself curled around her pillow, inhaling, sobbing, until he slept.

then he dreamed. he dreamed of his wife, of the girl he ran from, of honeysuckled nights and women who drew blood.

the next day he gave his brother in the law the keys to the house, bought a plane ticket home.

his sister met him at the airport and, in the silence he created when he entered her car, she told him.

the girl was still single, still on the other side of the country, still. still.

still.

he spent that night in a chair on their parents' front porch. when the sun rose, he hadn't slept. he took his mother's car keys from the bowl just inside the door and drove to her parents' house.

they were still there, a few months shy of moving back to her homestate, and gave him her address.

he thanked them, spent the rest of the week landscaping their yard for them, trimming the bushes and pulling the weeds, as repayment for the information they had given him.

that sunday he was on another bus. this time, going west.

his wedding ring stayed on his finger.

his silence stayed around him, until a little boy sat next to him. they talked about baseball and dinosaurs, compared magic tricks and scars.

then he was there. at the bus stop he found directions to her apartment and walked the few miles to it.

he sat in the lobby until she returned.

walking in, she had changed. her hair was shorter, straighter. her skin had darkened. but her eyes were as open as he remembered, and she stopped.

and he said, "you've been the one."

and she said, "i'm sorry."

and he said, "i've loved you this time."

and she said, "i'm sorry."

and he said, "i'll go."

and she said, "have dinner before you leave."

and together they walked up the two flights of stairs and his first christmas gift to her, a reproduction of a painting, was hanging in the living room.