j, my j, you’ve recanted.
    Shouldn’t “recant” mean “to sing again”?

to hear my own breathing
If I woke in the night, the precious nights I had you here, I was always taken aback at how hard it was to detect your breaths. Even when you were deeply out (pretty much always) your breathing was delicate; once or twice I almost panicked, you know how the mind works at night, and there were always those footlights of unease around our meetings, fear of your husband interrupting our, uh, tutorial with a call, so that panic could feed on puny fears and several times I actually put the back of my hand to your open mouth to feel the breaths. Then my mouth next to yours to breathe them in. That close, I found you breathing, of course, calm and profound, with the faintest alto wheeze low in your chest, under your bare breasts, which were pillowed one over the other as you lay furled on your side. Your breath smelled fine, spicy, with a subtle finish of garlic and Syrah. Then one night it changed. That’s how I knew we were coming to an end. More conventional signs had arisen as well — your canned laughter, diluted gaze, undilated pupils — but that was how I knew: the last two nights your breath turned sour in your sleep. Changes deep inside, where I couldn’t reach. I wonder about the air in that blocked tunnel, after forty years of disuse. Is oxygen stable or does it deteriorate over time? I wouldn’t know. Your husband would. Could toxic fumes have seeped in through the limestone? If the ends were unblocked tonight, could we still walk through it and breathe? How long does a closed-off tunnel remain a possible route?

always in dialogue
To you it may have felt that way. You’re the one with other allegiances. (More of them, maybe, than I thought.) A day came when I abandoned my latest stalled article to check email — still dial-up then — maybe thirty times, hoping for a reply. You must have been reflecting a little. Finally I just remained online, waiting. I answered a few other “urgent” emails that I’d left to ripen for days, maybe weeks. That took some time. I’ve never learned, like you, to crash out a reply, in lowercase, in the current electronic shorthand that I am still not used to — insulting! — though I see it all the time from my students : ) Did those. Waited. Stared at the empty inbox and willed a message to appear. For quite some time I stuck it out. Funny, I’ve never once sat staring at the phone, though you would sometimes phone me. Staring at a phone seems somehow goofier. A screen is meant to be stared at. Things are meant to appear there. Maybe I could induce you to write me. Eventually I took the modem cord and slunk the three flights down to the lobby and locked it in the morgue-like drawer of my mailbox. Came upstairs for a double Campari and soda. Left the cord down there for a good half-hour.

i am sorry if this feels abrupt or my reasons feel vague, they just must be
Oh and another nice thing about email: you are always sitting down to read it. No more Puccini swoons, buckling to the floor with the farewell letter clenched in one hand, the other cupping the brow. Instead, you settle deeper in your chair. The world stops entering your mind through the senses. You’ve been sealed off with your obsession, and shame. my reasons must be kept vague. I always knew there were truths you wouldn’t tell me, so I avoided entering certain corridors of inquiry; but there was also an implication, about the two of us, that we just knew — we UNDERSTOOD. William Burroughs said that gay love differs from straight love because a queer lover (“homosexual” was how he put it, I believe) always knows what the other is thinking and feeling, while a straight lover never does. Hmmm… better that I did my thesis on Bloomsbury and Woolf, instead of (a quip over cocktails, long ago) Bloomsbury & the Beats: Points of Unexpected Comparison.

as i guess i implied
Didn’t we make a pact never to do this sort of thing? To guess and imply? To become, in each other’s sight, hazy at the margins by delivering half-truths? That’s how people deconsecrate themselves, from human into something less. Spectres. Cyborgs. Didn’t I mention this opinion? Not that you listened well, ever. Speaking of blockages. Consider the ears of the egoist…

Now, as I listen, trying to peer through this blockage, I wonder if you are alone. There’s your husband, of course, but he doesn’t count. Two daughters. Neither do they. For the purpose of this madness only somebody else counts. (Especially if female.) You told me I was the first woman you had been with. Is there another now?
   Have I created a monster?

i have been asked to keep secrets
The cathedral’s literature (I went and took one of their tourist leaflets; lit a lampion for the hell of it) gives no clue as to how, or with what, the passageway was sealed.

i know you understand
See above under Burroughs, William.

you, after all, are one of my secrets
One of your… excuse me? I thought this was an exclusive engagement! Now I’m no longer your secret, I’m one of your secrets? Um, are your secrets a clique now? A category? A women’s collective? All on the same level… Maybe your secrets should all be more civil about this. Maybe they should get used to one another. Your secrets are “all in this together”… no rank, no priority, no hierarchy of closeness… it’s a sorority, a full democracy of secrets!… The one exact thing that love isn’t.

as you know yourself
Oh, I do. One of us had to end it. The question is: who began it, Janet? Another reference that dates me and, by omission, you. We have all the particulars. The year (2002). The season (summer). The place (Kingston). The course (Religious Imagery in Popular Culture and Contemporary Women’s Fiction), and you in semi-attendance to steal time — admit it, finally, you’re a dabbler, a summer slummer — away from your aphasic husband and colicky twins. When you went back to Winnipeg in the fall, I assumed it was over, but the thing wouldn’t die. Since then I’ve propped everything on your annual holiday here in the Thousand Islands.