Twelve Winters by Suri Nahunte

[Author's Note: A short fiction inspired by "Early Autumn" by Langston Hughes.]

We met at a public library one gorgeous mid-April morning in New York twelve years ago. He was poring over the pages of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, oblivious to the world beyond its covers. That same book was, in fact, the very reason why I had been haunting that library like a restless ghost every weekend. Only there could I read poetry in absolute
silence, far from my constantly raving and ranting neurotic flat mate…

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15th April 1996

Dear Diary,

Everything that happened today is like a series of fast-paced snatches from a romantic film: we exchanged hellos, found out we’re both mad about Whitman, had an animated discourse on the poetic theses of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, exchanged addresses and phone numbers, had a brainstorming over lunch about a plan to publish our poems, and made out in his car by sundown. All on the same day… This must be the start of something great!…



21st April

Dear Diary,

I just know he is a kindred spirit. A soul mate. The one I was born for. He makes me laugh. On the day we first met, he said he has never in his entire life met someone from the Philippines, that he doesn’t even know where in the world the Philippines is, and that he used to believe (up until we met!) that my home country is just a fictitious place, sort of like Camelot or Atlantis. Our Camelot, yes. Funny guy…

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We were happy just writing poems, reading them to each other, building dreams, making out behind bookshelves at the public library (We mutually agree it’s a most thrilling adventure), or in the back seat of his midnight blue Mustang at some obscure parking lot…


That had been the middle of spring twelve years ago.


Now, sitting here, lazing around Central Park on a grey, late-fall afternoon, holding a paperback copy of Muffled Cries and Other Poems, the tenth best-selling book written by a poet named Earl Charles Warner, I wonder if I would ever again gaze into the bespectacled blue eyes of the man I lost twelve years ago to a wealthy publisher eight years his senior. (His profile reads: “…recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature…currently resides in Charleston, West Virginia with his wife and publisher, Lauren, and daughters Erin, Ashley, and Lindy.”)


He had to make a wise career move, of course. After that beautiful spring, we said goodbye to our dreams and to each other, reluctantly believing that it was the best decision and the only
option left to us.


He now owns one of the largest publishing companies in the continent and his eleventh book is underway. I, too, have done my part – and am still doing it well – in this tragic drama
called life according to my pre-destined role. I married a Fil-Hispanic art dealer I met in Brooklyn a year after Earl and I drifted apart, and raised our kids there, all five of them.


Since the parting twelve years ago, I have resolved to put down the pen, take up the paintbrush, and pursue my other love: painting. For more than a decade now, I’ve been living a
semi-reclusive life at my Soho loft, where I have put up an art studio, occasionally visiting Greenwich for my painting exhibits.


Anytime now, the first snow may fall. It’s going to be our twelfth winter apart. Why don’t I dial his number or email him? Perhaps,


(It’s late autumn…)


he’ll recognize my voice at once


(…winter’s coming)


and may even arrange for a reunion at some fancy restaurant down in Manhattan



(…twelfth winter apart)


which I’m desperately looking forward to because, God,


(…twelve cold, lonely winters)


I so badly want him still and love him and need him now more than ever!


But after all these lonely years in this foreign country, I still couldn’t bring my self to getting it
done because if I did that, the world would never make sense the way it does now.


Twelve years ago, Earl and I vowed to let each other go. To grow roots on the right soil. I have been faithful to that vow since the day I stood as best man at his and Lauren’s wedding.


I guess in this lifetime at least, we’ll just have to be husbands to our wives and fathers to our children.#