100 Proof

Every year, it rolls up on my calendar one week before Christmas. I don’t celebrate it anymore, and to be honest, I don’t even remember how we celebrated at the time. But I never delete the marker, and every year, I whisper to myself, “Happy birthday.”

The I-walls in New Orleans couldn’t hold back the floods. They weren’t deep enough, they weren’t strong enough, they weren’t steady enough.

There were those engineers that knew the walls couldn’t handle it.

If I had to guess, I’d say there are many of those engineers who have seen their relationships fail, their lives disintegrate, and have had to move to temporary housing. If I had to guess, I’d say they probably never connected their home and their work.

Each time I opened the door, the flowers were the first thing I smelled, their fragrance filling the room just lightly enough that I wanted them to stay always.

Yet, it became clear to me, as I woke up weeping for the third morning in a row, that they were too much. They had overwhelmed my eyes’ defenses.

After camp, I wrote the boy from California. He lived in Pasadena, and one day, an earthquake closed the schools. I tried and tried to call his house, but all circuits were busy.

We didn’t have email, or cellphones, or text messages. He had sent me a letter or two, written on three-hole-punched notebook paper. I held the letters. I wished for him to call me, to tell me he was OK.

When I finally reached him after the circuits settled down, he seemed surprised I’d been so worried.

Without him in the house anymore, I became unmoored. I ate non-breakfast leaning against the counter—leftover pasta and meatloaf and sautéed spinach. Ice cream. I stayed up too late and struggled to awaken in the morning.

Once, it was only my friend banging on the window of my room that roused me. She had gone from door to door, window to window, until she pounded on the glass next to my bed.

Are you OK? she asked.

I stood on the slippery porch, disheveled and sweating.

On those days, I left as the sun came up, and I returned after the sun went down. Our street was deeply dark, strangely lacking enough streetlights, and our porch was painted with gray paint that grew slippery when it was wet. It was slightly slanted in that old house, soon-to-collapse sort of way. Sometimes, when I walked up the steps, my feet slid backward. Every day, in winter, I felt just one wrong step from disaster.

Your face was placid, neutral, devoid of whatever could be called fierce or righteous. There was no indignation there. There was no passion. There was only blankness to belie what was really happening—the fact that you were not slipping away, that you slipping away would indicate a there that was never there. What I mistook for love was simply fear of saying goodbye.