Before and After Notting Hill
It was right before I fell asleep when a daydream lit my mind, breathless. Driving with you to Savannah, hands intertwined on the glove compartment. Simple. The last golden hour of sunlight, leaves blurred into a jade ribbon outside. Maybe the wind through your hair. Your smile.
But we’ve barely ever talked and I’m afraid you’d bore of me. Sometimes even I don’t want to spend a whole day with myself.
I stood by a woman on the subway. Moles constellated around her lips and nose. She looked barely older than me, really—a few years. She wore a gray jersey dress that curtained around her knees and translucent yellow jelly shoes for feet swollen against the cage of her bones. Her hand curved over a pregnant stomach, not yet so huge she couldn’t stand with a straight back. Like everyone, she swayed when we began moving again.
Yesterday when I was walking by the highway, I heard a loud pop behind me, followed by a few honks. Then the cement truck came into view, its blinker flashing right right. The car behind it slowed. It turned onto a ramp and rounded the corner, disappearing behind a building. The car once behind it kept straight and sped on.
What I talk about when I talk about memory is usually the shape it takes leaping off the tongue when I wish instead it had sunk roots into my neck and brushed against every word I ever spoke again, the shape a skeleton takes when it begins to surface in the thoughts of those who buried it hopefully with the kind of grin you could never manage in life, hopefully like earthrises on the moon where you see the blue dot climbing and you know there’s my home, there it is, there.
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