“So, we were sitting at breakfast, and my friend said, ‘I get the idea there’s 10 percent of you that I’m seeing, and 90 percent that’s percolating beneath the surface,’” I said.
“He must have been smart to have noticed that,” he said.
“He’s not that smart,” I said. “That’s why he’s just a friend.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But he was smart enough to have breakfast with you.”
I have three days of non-perishable food, a crank-powered flashlight, enough wine to numb me to all manner of disaster. I have a journal, many friends on speed-dial, and plenty of books I haven’t read. I know disintegration comes on slowly, like the earth peeling apart. I know, though, when the rupture happens, when the relationship experiences irreconcilable liquefaction, it cannot help but disorient and cause panic. So I’m prepared, ever-prepared, to say goodbye and erect all necessary perimeters around my heart at a moment’s notice.
It seems like it takes forever for the sun to reach the horizon, the moments before sunrise as slow as if someone is down there, pulling on the ball of fire, making it stay where it is a few minutes longer. But when it finally rises, it makes an expeditious arc through the sky, blazing through the degrees as if it had been launched from below.
Back then, I kept a journal of angry words. He never appears anywhere there—I knew better than to make mention. I gave everyone around me enough credit to recognize him, even disguised, on the page.
Here’s this about that: even without a single word on the page, I see him there, peering through the words as if I used them to capture every single memory. Even reading about that anger reminds me that, mixed in, there was a bittersweet happiness that could not be denied.
I thought I was the only one who still remembers details: the smoky scotch, the way he picked me up over his shoulder in the street while I laughed harder than I had in forever, the last dance before he left to catch his plane.
Imagine my surprise when he passed them back to me like small gifts: a favorite drink, my favorite flower, the song that used to tie us across the miles. “I made curry tonight,” he said, and even years later, it remained as inside a joke as if we had shared it yesterday.
The clouds raced across the sky, although she called them fog and he called them clouds, and the music soared away with enough of her heart to sting her. Standing there, on that green blanket in trampled grass, she shrank under the size of the year from which she’d emerged, and reached out a hand to the one person who understood this the very most.
“I feel like I’m returning to the scene of a crime,” I said.
“Your only crime is being a sexy bitch,” she replied.
“It’s not my crime,” I said, “that I’m worried about.”
100 Proof 