‘What are you doing
here?’
‘I….’ ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know.’
‘Can you forgive me?’
‘No.’ ‘I have nothing
to forgive you for.’ ‘How could I blame
you for not knowing you loved me?’
‘I didn’t know.’ ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Some things you just have
to know.’ ‘and you didn’t.’ ‘or you did, and you were scared by what you
knew.’ ‘Which would be worse actually’
‘Why would that be
worse?’
‘Because if you didn’t
know that you’re supposed to be scared. That there is always fear…’ ‘If you
didn’t know that then you didn’t know anything about love’ ‘maybe not anything, but definitely you
would not know enough.’
She blinked, hard and slow. Her hair worn as it had always
been. Center-parted and unbraided, long sheets of brown. Her hands too as always
they had had been – long and slender, nervously held in front. She’s holding a
letter in an envelope. One of them is trying not to cry.
The balcony and the sound of pattering flip-flopped feet. A
sun dress and his half drank tumbler. There music in the background. Fleming
street is alive but they're imagining other places. Like a rising tide the people
gather at Mallory Square but they’re staying alone together in the hammock.
The door is locked and she is sobbing in the bathroom. He is
banging on the door. He doesn’t want in, its all just dramatic gestures at
this point. He can’t remember if he realized in real time that loss can only be
understood in terms of other loss and that he hadn’t lost enough yet to understand
what she knows or if he projected that realization later into the memory. Some part
of the self always wants to make sense of scenes.
He makes her dance. And she does. These moments she thinks are
ever too fleeting. Three minutes and eleven seconds, it doesn’t help to try and
move the needle back. The record rolls on and the joy recedes as suddenly as it
came crashing in. There’s footsteps in the snow and its always darker sooner
than she’d like. After she flexes her unsocked feet on the cold floor and he
sits back down.
He hadn’t seen her approach. If it wasn’t the first day of
spring, it was no more than the second. All the same people who had spent the
previous months huddled inside behind the thick glass doors and walls of the bar
had replicated their positions, their stances, their company on the patio. He was
there with strangers, familiar but not friends, leaning in the strange comfort
of half a hundred unrelated conversations.
It was not the experience he had envisioned. It was not a bound,
a racing heart, an embrace.
