She always used to carry lemon drops with her. Something about believing that she was the real world’s Dumbledore. Her hands, she said, were also dying because she, too, tried to hold onto something too powerful for her. There are no physical symptoms, but she is certain that her hands are slowly expiring. 

    “What were you holding onto?” I asked her, the first time that she brought it up.

    “Love. My own stubbornness. A refusal to see what was really there,” she said. She sipped her tea. Her cup was always cold by the time that she remembered it was there.

    I didn’t ask her any further that first time. I was too intimidated. She was so unapologetic. Her bluntness felt like an intrusion on my part. The winter had come and gone by the time her hands came up again. The air smelled like it was waking up, alive, and ripe with spring. 

    I was bringing her boxes of old letters when I found the letters. The papers were brown and curled. Dryer than any papers I had ever seen, as if they were evaporating.

    “I was not so young when I met him. Carl. He was like me, a musician. Nothing fancy, neither of us were famous. But each of us had built a career on playing locally, providing lessons. For a while I was a professor. We became inseparable after the first couple of dates. We would go dancing, he taught me to swing. I was always too self conscious to get into blues dancing. When we weren’t dancing, we walked. We wandered all around town. Soon enough we were living together, sharing a small mattress, sharing habits. I didn’t notice at first. He had always told me he loved me. Every night before we slept, he would give me a kiss and tell me he loved me. And when we woke up, he would kiss me again. I found a letter hanging out of his desk one morning after he had gone to work. I knew that I shouldn’t read it, it was none of business, but curiosity is a difficult beast to fight when you are young. Not that it is any easier when you get older, but that is neither here nor there. The letter was from a woman. I recognized her name as a clarinetist that had been in a group Carl played with before we met. The letter was recent, only a few days old. In it, this woman, she said things that didn’t make sense to me. I assumed that she was confused. That she had at one time had a crush on Carl and this letter was just a result of her not being able to let the past go. But then I noticed another letter, in the desk drawer. It was in Carl’s handwriting and it wasn’t finished. It was to the woman. The things he said, I didn’t know what to think. It didn’t make sense with the person I knew. When I asked Carl about it, he denied everything. He was furious. How could I do this to him.