Somehow, I became an accessory in the retelling, my appearance so useless and peripheral I could not imagine why I had not been edited out. The story had no need of a traveling companion, and my presence there was all the more awkward for what was not written in.
Archive for the ‘Kind of true’ Category
Broken wall
April 8, 2009One day we snuck off to an upstairs landing and sat against a tiled wall that hadn’t been properly glued. It all happened almost listlessly: Your face tensing, your eyes rolling to look above my head. The hunch of my shoulders as the tiles tumbled, corners and ceramic bouncing off my head as they careened floorward.
“We need to excise those ghosts that haunt you,” a friend said recently.
I disagree. I think the ghosts were trying to protect me, knocking the wall down in an effort to get me out of there alive. Thank you, ghosts.
Requiem
March 30, 2009A young woman died, and he made a CD of requiems for the parents.
“I don’t know what it is to lose a child,” he said. “But there is music and that’s why it was written.”
He sang a few bars of the Britten War Requiem, conducting the wordless language of loss.
With you
March 26, 2009“I can’t wait to see who you end up with,” she said, and I laughed, because it was the only noise that made sense in that moment.
I laughed, because I walk every day in hope, but fear trails behind me, threatening to overtake me at any moment. Maybe, it whispers, you’ll only end up with you.
The definition of flirting
March 6, 2009“I’m an incorrigible optimist sometimes,” he said. “An incorrigible flirt other times.”
“The two are not entirely incompatible, you realize,” I said. “Flirting is, after all, essentially an expression of incorrigible optimism.”
Even now
February 16, 2009The opening notes sounded, and without warning, I could hear you playing, the guitar resting on your torn cutoff jeans, your t-shirt loose on your wiry frame.
“He could still break my heart, even now,” I told someone the other day. And it’s true. Every word of it.
No matter how old I get, I will never forget the crinkles at the corner of your eyes, the speed of your pulse just after I kissed you, and how my body shook, uncontrollably, when I knew it was finally over.
On a Monday
February 8, 2009There was no good reason. It had not even been a particularly out-of-the-ordinary day. Nonetheless, there she was, opening one of the best bottles she owned, savoring it, making no apologies for turning the time she had into an event.
100 Proof 