Jacqueline Goyette
Antwerp
I hold you tight on days like this. New Year's Eve, and we walk through the city of Antwerp and this bitter winter, hold onto each other like this is city is ours. With you, I pretend to know the streets, to have memorized the cobblestones, each one — we count them out loud in our sloppy French — un deux trois -- laugh at the accent. Is this even the right language for the city we are in? It is easy to get confused. We come to Belgium every year but to the other cities - Brussels, Bruges, Ghent — not to Antwerp, and I eat what is left of a waffle — ooey gooey chocolate that is still just warm, all over my fingers, my lips, the edge of my mouth — and we walk. We scuff our shoes against the surface of these roads, welcome the worn out sheen, the wear and tear, how many years they have been here in this shape, in this condition. Is it a lifetime or more? We are arm in arm and my scarf is pulled tight around me, too summery to be a winter scarf (unlike the scarves of the other people we pass — their cozy knit scarves snug around their necks) but I walk by and envision a new life for us : we saw it in a holiday movie, the way you can be someone else for a day, cook dinner and laugh at the coincidence when I make your favorite meal. There are Christmas lights here and I point them out: let's say we are newlyweds and that is our home, the one with the shutters, the gilded ridges, the grey smudge of a cat sitting in the window, waiting. I am your first love. Your last love. We are fluent in forever.
You said so at the restaurant last night in Brussels where the Magritte bowler hats were painted on the ceiling and you cut up your glazed ham and I slurped up spoonfuls of asparagus soup, pale green and buttery. You asked me to play pretend with you, and so we did: you counted the other Italians in the room, I recognized no Americans. Maybe I've lived here too long, a new continent that I've inherited, that can be folded up, pressed into my pocket. They say you can only fold a piece of paper in half seven times before it cannot be folded again — and I think of how many times I've folded my dreams for you, folded my life into paper squares that can fit into a carry-on bag and lugged onto a plane from Indianapolis to Rome. Folded family away, folded language into new words, folded the losses of parents, of loved ones, of so many years — seven times is not enough. Folded this room, even — tried so hard to fit you into the edges of it just to be part of this corner of you. We are older now, don't you feel it? In the windy bristle of an Antwerp morning, you crease the cardboard container where the waffle once was but now it is just chocolate, hardened in the wind cold day. I hold it in my hands. It still smells of violets, like the city itself is made of them.
If we were to live here together, I would set up camp at the base of the Rubens paintings in the cathedral, cry everyday at the opening of the triptychs, how Jesus tumbles out of them every time, dead now, the whispers of how it could have happened, his mother's tears. I wouldn't pretend at all — I would learn this new language, take long walks to the sea, start over again — even now. I would reach for the other life that includes the town square, the tram stops, the frites that you hold in little cardboard pyramids upside down, unfolded. The corner chocolate shops, the warm woolen hats, the bright red awnings, billowy like sails on a ship, carrying the last few moments of this old year. I would memorize the tram lines, walk past the hulk of a fountain everyday, the one where the soldier is clutching the severed hand of a giant and casting it out to sea: that's where the name comes from, Antwerp. Flung to sea, this fairytale of a watery mistress, this dream that someone wrote down on paper, charted the stops into roads and canals. Like maybe the city disappears when the book is closed, the map folded up. Maybe we all do. Maybe we can lose an entire city, a continent perhaps, all memory of it — drown it in the waves of the North Sea.
The next day or the one after, we will fly back to Italy and I will lean into your shoulder, hold your hand, fingers looped in yours — the us that we are, nothing changes after all. But before that we will count down to the new year, drink from glasses of champagne at a colorful bar. The band will play happier tunes, Twist and Shout, La Bamba, and the whole bar will start dancing, start blowing kisses — a celebration. The waiters will dance. Outside there will be fireworks that shout out a new day. But I will be misty eyed and nostalgic, no noisemakers, no swinging hips. Not the hope of the year to come but the grief for a year that has passed. How we lived it, isn't that enough? All of that is gone now — the day is fading fast. What are the fireworks for? The dancing? Where are the words on my lips — whatever version of me this is — for the day, that sometime-day, when we will have to say goodbye?
Jacqueline Goyette is a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work can be found in both print and online journals, including JMWW, trampset, Phoebe Journal, Stanchion, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Citron Review, and Centaur Lit. She is a Best Microfiction and a Best of the Net nominee, and her work was recently selected to appear in the Best Small Fictions 2025 anthology. She lives in the small town of Macerata, Italy with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom.
