Wednesday, September 7, 2011

I don't miss you anymore.

You came home sweating, heart pounding, and smelling like gin and tonic.

I pressed my hands against you and felt you laugh. I didn't know yet that you would leave me in the fall.


Her hair was long and dyed and she complained about her chicken legs, and as the leaves turned you kept each other warm.

I didn't know yet that I would be drunk, sad, and hopeful one night and drive through your new neighborhood, creeping next to your bedroom window and tapping the glass.

You didn't answer. I didn't come back.


She let me borrow her car once when I went to visit your new apartment where she and a roommate had a spare room. Her roommate was mistress to the married bartender and she spoke of him as if he was her own. I listened like a fool, not knowing what was happening behind a door down the hall.

I said goodbye and drank the beer you offered me on my way home where I had lived with you, because I thought you were my own.


I saw you once in a bar and you said hello as if my feelings weren't made of glass anymore.

You smiled, drank, talked to your friends then got in your car.

As if you used to be mine I hurried through the parking lot and tapped on your driver's door.

I remember crying. I remember being upset with my own soggy reflection. I didn't hear anything you said from your side of the glass, all sealed up in your new life, while I stood in the parking lot with my old life, its stuffing still strewn about.


Years later you called me and we talked about a plane crash in Long Island. You said you found a hand in your backyard. You were kidding, but I looked down and found a zombie in my shoes.

Someone told me the old university closed. That's where I met you. I was doing fine and living in a cottage on a sandy road near quiet dunes and gentle surf. Your car pulled in weeks later and you said you didn't like grad school. There you were and there we were, and then one day we weren't and it was all the same to you. As the summer ran out and autumn came the landlords wanted us out. You soon moved without me and I would sit there in that house, the last to leave. But days earlier we dropped off the old Dodge Dart at the city dump's gates. Closed on a Sunday.

No comments:

Post a Comment