100 Proof

Somewhere over Virginia, someone closed the windowshade to my right. I woke up for good as the plane began its descent, and opened the shade, expecting to see buildings but only catching glints of light off the slate blue of Lake Michigan.

“I’m jealous you were able to sleep the whole way,” said the man who had sat to my left. “I closed the shade for you, but I didn’t think anything was going to disturb you.”

“Thank you,” I said to this man I had slept next to, this man who took care of me just a little.

“You get those tickets yet?” His voice sounded sandpapery as he spoke into his cellphone. “You even know what tickets look like?”

He looked out across the airport restaurant, his body shaped as if his weight had spent its lifetime giving in to gravity, and slouched further down in the seat. He could no more make himself small than he could hide the fact that he was staring at cleavage a table away.

“It was a joke,” he growled. “Goodbye.”

His burger arrived, and he began with the fries, eating as if no one was documenting this.

The rain fell so hard I drove the road from memory, picturing each curve and hoping no car came alongside to show where the actual diverged from the image in my head. I was driving to the gymnast’s house, and I had not told my boyfriend. The funny thing, I thought as I struggled to hold the road, was that neither of them was worth this sort of effort.

That season, I was sicker than I’d ever been. Cold, cough, fever, flu; my body would not carry me down the hall. The bed pulled me under and you, you made me soup and brought me Gatorade.

While I slept, though, you played me. When I woke, everything had changed, although it had been changing all along and I just hadn’t noticed. That was when I began to heal.

A moment after take-off, the plane’s wings dipped left, then right. There was quiet flying for a time, then another bout or two of bumpy air. Toward the end of the flight, the plane descended through clouds, leaping and lurching toward the runway as if it were off-roading. The wheels smacked the runway as if the pilot had stopped paying attention when the ground approached.

But then it all stopped, and the bell overhead told me it was time to disembark, to ready myself for the smoother path ahead of me.

We tried not to rock our chairs. We might have spilled our dinners. We reached across to each other. We held hands. We let go. We let go. We let go.

The only light fell across them from the garage. She clutched the steering wheel and smiled, but not at him, just into the space between the car and the house. He lingered. She kept her body angled at something closer to 35 or 45 degrees – she hoped it said what she wasn’t able to put between them.