Your mother gave me your hair, braided tightly and secured at either end with small blue hairbands, from your first haircut when you were a child many years before. It was blonde, brightly so, surprisingly so, because for all the years I had known you your hair had been dark, the closest it came to brightness being when you dyed it red because you knew that was my favourite colour of hair, a fact I revealed to you as we stood in front of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss in the Belvedere museum in Vienna, our first holiday as a couple with the words ‘I love you’ bright and fresh on our lips. It was soft too, your tightly braided length of hair, soft like I had never know any hair, before or since, to be soft, not even your hair during our years together when barely a day would pass when it did not pass through my fingers, the tangible whisper of it sliding across my skin.

It was the morning of our wedding and your mother had tears in her eyes as she handed me your hair, telling me that it was right that I should have it, I who was about to be your husband. I took it in my hand, holding it gently as I would a small animal, and thanked her, those two words quivering as though I too would soon have tears in my eyes, then we left for the church where you and I would exchange our vows in front of friends and family, the day forever captured in photographs and memory.

 I still have your hair, all these years later, though I no longer have you. I, a fool, cruelly – so very cruelly, acid filling my chest as I think of it now – discarded you because I thought my heart belonged to someone who I had loved in the teen years of my life, their reappearance in my life like a gift from the past, youth and first love returned at a time when age was turning the edges of my life grey and heavy, only realising my mistake when it was too late, the chamber of your heart that I used to occupy visibly closed off as we stood in front of a judge who nullified the words we had spoken so many years before in front of our friends and family, your eyes passing across me as though I were nothing more than a stranger to you, not even someone you had once known let alone loved.

I hold it now, your hair, so alive and soft in my hand, its blondness bright through my blurred eyes, discarded as I have been myself – a fitting punishment, perhaps, an eye for an eye, a broken heart for a broken heart? – years after I realised my terrible mistake, years – too many years – in which I held onto this old love newly known because I had sacrificed so much to know it. Not long after my own discarding – was the pain you felt similar to the pain I felt, so savage and cruel and almost mocking? – I came across your hair in boxes long unopened, moving from a house no longer my home, the door closing behind me quick enough to touch the edge of my heal and send a vibration up my body that felt like a shiver of instinctive warning, or perhaps an echo of what had gone before, the hard shock of betrayal that lay deep in my pain as I imagine it lay deep in yours.

I think of calling you ­ – I remember your phone number even years after I last dialled it – to see if you would like it back, your hair from your first haircut so many years ago. I think of that, of calling you, and try not to imagine the answer I deserve.

Edward Lee’s poetry, short stories, non-fiction, and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib and Poetry Wales. He is currently working on a novel.

He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.

His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com