Letter to Echo

Dear Echo--
I wish I could tell you all the things we used to tell each other, but you're not around, and I don't think you ever really were. I keep meeting people with your name, but none of them look like you, and none of them look like me, none of them are you, and I can't find you. I think some of them love or loved me a little, and maybe I loved or still love them a little, but none of them are you. I can't find you. No one could ever read me like you could. So I'm left looking for your traces in a country I don't know, and I wonder, I wonder if, when I get to look into mirrors again, if I'll still wonder if I'll see you, coming from behind me, like a hurricane, like a hunger, like a message from the water. And I wonder if I'll find a way to stop looking for you before the Summer is over, because I don't know how to be with the people who remind me of you, when they turn out not to be you. And they always do. And I wonder if you're living behind the eyes of the woman on the train, in the cafe, on the street, checking my eyes to see if I've stopped looking for you, because I think that when I do, I might decide to enter this life, as if I were born to walk in it. I miss you on all the corners of the earth.
--N