― Stephen King
I know when my life began to come apart—the day Abigail left for Florida without me—or more correctly, the day I foolishly let her go.
After that, my writing career took off, but nothing between us was ever the same.
I didn’t make it down to Sarasota to see her for the three days I promised, or for that other week—there were a dozen more planning sessions and meets and greets. By the time all the schmoozing was done, I won a contract for an even better book deal and lost the only woman I ever loved.
It was during that week in Florida when Abigail met Yuri, a day trader on the Toronto Stock exchange, and he swept her off her feet.
Lauree, Brett’s girlfriend, is still friends with Abigail, so every now and then word filters back to me and I get the updates on how’s she’s been. I know she and Yuri have a penthouse condo somewhere in Toronto, and I also know she’s unhappy—I’m not surprised.
Because it’s also the story of my life.
I suppose Abi thinks I’ve moved on, but I haven’t. I own a loft in the Flatiron Building and a Bentley in an underground parking space, but happiness is relative, and I’m nightly tormented by memories as I obsessively relive our past.
For most people, the past is a fragile membrane, soft as gossamer and at the mercy of whims—but not for me. I have a perfect recall of every hasty word, every foolish faux pas I ever made, and every careless moment I let her slip away.
Some go to bed to dream—not me. I lie down to be tortured with images of what used to be and can never be changed.
This was my bleak fate as I contemplated a future without Abigail, but one day, quite unexpectedly, everything changed. It was a moment Jung might call synchronicity—because in revisiting a familiar haunt from our past, I ran into her doing the same.
We had shared an apartment in Toronto’s west end—a small one-bedroom in a walk-up built in the Thirties that now was scheduled for demolition.
I chose a fateful day—November third, the day she left—to revisit and lay the past to rest. It was a dreary and rainy fall afternoon, but I persevered in my quest, never supposing Abigail might be drawn there as well.
It was one of those improbable chance encounters—the kind Dickens portrayed so vividly in Great Expectations—love in the ruins, with Estella looming as a figure in darkness, gradually approaching as Pip slowly discerns her face.
Change the characters, and it was Abigail and I, reliving a part of us that was slipping away.
I was standing under an umbrella looking up at our old third floor window when a figure approached, intending to pass me on the sidewalk, but then faltered and called out my name. I recognized her in an instant.
“Abigail!” my mind shouted.
It was one of those occasions when time freezes and your whole life passes before you.
I was almost afraid to breathe for fear her ghost was haunting me, and the mere act of addressing her aloud might cause her apparition to vanish.