I sat in my car and considered memories of her.
Maybe it was something in the way the clouds came in. Quiet looming, grey with no hint of ominousness, or the starkness of the bare branches. Or maybe it was the words. Or maybe it had just been enough time.
It was possible still to pull a few back, those spring scenes. But there did not seem to be a story left in them, just fragmented stand still frames. Standing naked in the kitchen passing the glass of water back and forth. Kissing at the capitol heights metro station gates, stealing seconds before bolting through the turnstiles to catch the last silver line. Somewhere drifting between those memories, through space not in some sort of chronological configuring she is sitting in the grass with a baby. The baby is real, the patchwork red and white blanket may or may not be. I can see you there -happy- you look up and catch me looking. We both smile. What day that was or even who the child was I can’t access. That memory is bookended by the smack of a thrown baseball against leather and us cursing at each other through an open passenger side window.
There are illuminated caves and cold hands and those inexplicable western Virginia towns, rotting away faster than the wood that held them up. Orangutans behind the glass, your half-finished paintings, a bed that wasn’t large enough, fever, and hand prints on the glass of the sliding glass doors. Sprinkled in between them are little echoing insults, thrown like darts-stinging like tacks, honed and purposeful that still prick- real as they might feel, I’m completely unsure when they existed or if they existed at all.
I can slide into those fabrications with ease, though the details always evade me. I never can remember why we are fighting. I wonder if that is self-preservation or if perhaps, by some sort of divine grace, in the end -only the things that really matter are remembered. After the tears and the yelling, the swelling brown warm feeling of righteous indignation, the only thing I remember with certainty of that day or days or that spring or of the assortion of grey shirts you wore, is that smile when you caught me looking at you with the baby, and knew what I knew in that moment.
I have to pluck at those memories, pull them like single threads, and each time I do they’re fainter.
They won’t last, they never do, they are being pulled back into dark waters- shell by shell.
The individuality of each one of those memories was collapsing, falling into, their final phase – where all that was or was not was only a single scene. Less factual and more true than any real memory, the room is grey scale- but that isn’t fabrication, that was the streetlight and the vertical blinds and the cool three am air and the exhaustion. There is the song. The one I asked you to listen to with me. The realness of any other thing would be impossible to tell, where was my head, against the flat of her stomach, or buried into back of her neck. Perhaps the holding of my own hands was surely real, clasped some way around her, and too the lonely ironing board. I can see those long legs and I can recall each evoked gasp and to the shimmering sound of her laughing. Where that spring day smile will one day fit I cannot yet guess. I suspect like everything else the acute features of your smile will fade and what will remain instead will be intangible and resolute, how the shared thing felt.
I imagine one day I will see her again and hope that she will greet me with a different smile- that sweet nostalgic one that we all carry, the one that escapes from us without reservation despite all the reasons we might have to keep it fettered. By then there will likely only be the grey room and her skin and those sounds and the feeling. I wonder if we will speak, briefly, and marvel at all of it all- strum the connecting fiber between us and listen to its particular sound. Perhaps we do or don’t but either way I know I will ask her- out of a need for clarity or perhaps out of longing or confusion or desire, ‘How long did it even last?’
And you will answer, ‘Six minutes and twenty seconds’
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