Forgotten. The defining word of the relationship, whether he wanted to admit it or not. The one-sided nature of it was not lost to him; not anymore than the irony of it. He had forgotten so many in his time, those people you meet for a spell and then erase from your mind. It was always easiest to forget them. After all, they didn't matter, right? The irony of it was not lost to him.
There in the Autumn darkness, standing outside that ruined old house that was no longer a home, he laughed and shook his head. He supposed that it was better for him to laugh, as opposed to crying or raging at the empty winds that slowly swirled around him. The leaves brought close by kept him company as he sat down on the old rocking chair there on the porch to wait. The traveling pack that he carried with him was heavy, so he found the occasion right to set it down gently and rummage through it. She would return.
In the recesses of the bag, he found a journal he'd filled with memories of her; a piece of the past that he still refused to discard for fear of forgetting the words he'd written within. The night was thick with her sounds, a twisting knife that he almost enjoyed. He closed his eyes and thought about her smile; about her voice, asking him thousands of innocent questions. He thought about a long drive on a stretch of road that had always been her favorite. He thought about all the things he'd given to her over the years. After all, it had been this long, hadn't it?
He rocked gently in the night and hummed her favorite song, and he hoped that she could hear him somewhere. The windows were empty behind him, but he liked to imagine her there, just as she was when they were a family; even after all of his friends had told him not to. It had never stopped him before anyway; Oh, he could see the harm in it, sure. But here he was, at this same old house where they'd brought her home for the first time, and he was waiting to hear her words behind him; waiting to feel her hands on his shoulders, though they had no reason for being there any longer. She would wander away sometimes, like the dead are known to do, forgetting about him for days or weeks at a time. But if he came back here, she would always remember. In the late hours of the night, he sat on the porch, waiting for her return.