100 Proof

Over the years, I’ve learned to give way, grudgingly, to what is needed most: an alarm-free morning, a snack before dinner, even 15 minutes with a pad of paper and a pen. On a rain-soaked evening, I sequestered myself at a café with Bach unaccompanied cello in my earbuds, the syrupy pull of bow on string enough to wring out everything that needed to be left there before resuming my evening with an open mind.

We are the regional jets lined up at the small airport. We taxi on short runways and lift off into questionable weather. We take glimpses East across the country on the approach to Western destinations, and we bear the buffeting of turbulence harder than the other planes. We land over circles and squares and spindly trees. We see you from up here. We want to get home just as badly as you do.

The message came just before mid-day—a passive explanation of why we would no longer see each other. I left the office immediately, retreated to a soaring sanctuary where I could sit and cry unnoticed. The sun filtered down from the ceiling and striped the wooden pews.

I lit a candle for the girl who had started to fall in love, who had, in just a few short weeks, put more of herself out there than she had in years. The candle sputtered and lit, a beacon to the resilience I’ve fostered with blistered hands.

Torn paper can be mended with starch paste and Japanese paper, the page a facsimile of whole, but never the same as before. If my heart were paper, it would look like a collage, here a patch of Kizukiski, there a strip of Okawara, and, near the center, an appliqué of Thin Uda left over from long ago.

I know so well the risk of handing over that collage to someone with clumsy hands, and so do all I can to offer the same ritual care when I agree to take another’s heart into my cupped palms.

All her life she raced at headlong speed, outrunning one thing and trying to catch another. Always exhausted, always exhilarated, she careened with purpose, a trick no one ever understood.

Though patience terrified her, she tried it on in this instance, buttoning it up like a new dress. She spoke it aloud, and he surprised her by saying it was alright.

Which would you rather have? he asked. The anticipation or the memory?

She kissed him again, because though she could be so unconstrained with words, gratitude muted her this time.

Pecking at scraps of bok choy and bitter melon, they are simply pigeons. They scurry to the side as I pass, glancing at me sideways from red-rimmed, beady eyes.

But, from my morning view overlooking Chinatown, I watch flight transform them. In the pale morning light, flocks swirl through the air like breath, arc like an audible sigh, turn as sharply as that quick intake just before lips meet. In the sky above the lacquered signs and carved lion faces, they are as oxygen to hope.