The version that fits.

I tell him I'm going to write.
That’s what I fed my second husband. 
Sun, distance, blue water, and space to clear my head. 
He ate it up. 
That’s the version that fits inside a marriage 
without splitting it open. 

But I came here to remember. 
To finish something 
that never had an ending. 
Twenty-five years is a long time 
to live inside a story that stops mid-sentence.

There's a villa on the hill that's mine
for exactly as long as October lasts,
and I do write there, some.
It's the rest of it I don't explain.

The water's still warm in October.
Warmer than August,
the sea holding onto summer,
crashing its waves against the stone.

The road up is white with heat that shouldn't
still be here this late in the year,
dust rising soft around my ankles.
Cicadas going,
too loud, the only sound for a mile,
until they stop all at once,
and the silence after is worse,
long enough that I count the seconds,
lining them up to my heartbeat.

The villa waits shuttered for eleven months.
I'm the only key that turns in that door.
The bougainvillea hasn't noticed
it's supposed to be dying—
it keeps climbing, magenta and stubborn,
past windows nobody's opened since I last did.

The iron gate sticks the way it stuck
when I was young enough
not to know yet what Octobers were for.

Inside, the dark smells like salt and grief
and something under both of those
I can only call him—
sandalwood, maybe, or gardenias,
or copper,
or guilt,
worn into bed sheets no one's touched.

His chair is where it's always been.
I don't sit in it.
I stand still letting the room
remember itself around me—
around us. 
Halls crowded with Greek torsos, 
cracked oil portraits fixed on every wall,
and under me, warm slabs of marble 
threaded with cobalt veins 
I'd traced with bare feet a thousand times,
still feel alive,
and for a second that undoes me
more than coldness would have.

I open the shutters.
Light comes in reluctant, 
settling over abandoned furniture 
and months of neglect. 
Dust turns in it,
slow,
the only thing in the villa that  
moves
on its own.

This place has been holding its breath
since I left it last October
and only now exhales,
in the comfort of company.
The plot of my old life
waits exactly where it ended,
the only mercy
October has ever offered me—
that some things, left alone long enough,

stay.

I write a page or two.
Stay is the saddest word
in the English language,
and I understand it fully
only here, in this house,

in October.

By the time I'm back at the taverna,
no one asks me how the writing's going.
They say: how was the house—
like it has moods,
like it is something that needed checking on.

I tell them the truth, mostly.
The shutters still hold.
They nod like it’s good news.

They know why I’m really here.
They stopped believing my writing
somewhere around the fourth October,
and there's a strange relief in that—
being looked at with sadness
instead of curiosity,
in not having to defend a novel
that was never really the point.

I leave the island
warm enough to forgive myself
for one more year
of opening a door
to the anniversary of my husband’s death, 
instead of selling the villa
and staying gone.

I don't know what I'd do
if it ever got cold there in October.
I might finally have to admit
what I actually go there to do.