Not knowing

‘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.