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There were some things about Daisy Buchanan that I would never forget, even if my existence had been erased from this universe.
Sitting before her under the dim lighting of a melancholic cafe, her voice still rang with the glow of money. It was only a few years ago when I could still parse out the lilt of sarcasm or the bubbly, genuine laughter from her tone—now, as a product of ten years and three children with Tom, she seemed almost entirely artificial, save for the warm hand that was gently covering mine as our eyes spoke the words we couldn’t bring ourselves to say. Daisy’s gaze seemed apologetic, though she was good enough at acting to put on a facade to fool her husband. Even if she was apologizing, I wasn’t sure what it was for. Perhaps it was about Gatsby? Or roping me into her vast carelessness that extended as far as her wealth? Or how she left without a word or a second glance at her world in the West Egg, crafted so intricately for her by a man she used to love? The reason, hidden behind murky clouds reflecting in eerily blue eyes, only slipped further away into the depths of Daisy’s consciousness as her hand slid back towards her lap. Before it could fully sink back into nothingness, I reached out—hand tight around her wrist, I forced her gaze into mine.
“Why?” I asked.
Daisy didn’t need an explanation to know what I was asking about. Clearly, it had also been on her mind all this time. For a long time, we sat in silence. I know that she was struggling to pull the words from the bitter taste of bile and guilt in her throat—there were only so many emotions that render a beautiful, wealthy fool like her so speechless and still. Finally, with a soft and unsteady tone, she spoke.
“Gatsby...He didn’t deserve that. Neither did you.”
She sounded so broken, so lost amidst the multitude of gravitational pulls that tugged at her desire until it was nothing more than a thin, feeble string, flapping tiredly in the wind. In that instant, I found myself feeling sympathetic, for the first time in my life, towards a distant cousin that lyricized charming nothings and expensive lies and existed in a different planetary orbit than I did. It was not her words, but her voice that had struck me. Her boat had long sunken, and her engine left to rot in a grimy junkyard. For the first time, she had sounded completely and utterly desolate.
Daisy’s voice had always been full of thick, crisp dollar bills that exuded refinement and elegance; you could hear it in the flutter of each whisper and the lush luxury that her melodies promised. But her song was also cash carelessly thrown around, bending and breaking under the will of others, driven forward by the desire of others rather than her own. Washed away by the waves of greed, what had been once hers slowly slipped from her grasp until she was worth no more than society’s green number imprinted on her lips. She had been lost to the world long since it had molded her into a commodity, passed around between the hands of bright young men chasing after a golden wind, hoping to catch a wisp of a dream.
On that listless, rainy Tuesday morning in New York, Daisy and I were the most intimate that we had ever been in our entire lives. There were still many things I wanted to say to her, many grievances that I had wanted to be expressed and confronted for Gatsby’s sake, but I sat back and let the silence take over our conversation. It was my way of telling her that through some strange and twisted solidarity in loneliness, I had forgiven her.