Friday, July 19, 2013

depart

I wanted to name the dog that we would one day eventually adopt "Ginger" in a nod to the cafe where we fell in infatuation with each other. I wanted you to cook me salmon and tell me about the different kinds of beers and maybe even introduce me to your siblings over a plate of sushi at the restaurant across from the canyon apartment you shared with your estranged wife.

I wanted to be every beautiful cliche.

One hundred and ten feet up in the sky you took up smoking. I don't blame you. At such great heights and in such oppressive heat, who wouldn't take a smoke break? The way to survive is through our lungs sometimes.

I won't go back to the place where we stayed the night I paid $140. I won't go back because I have no reason to. You gave up halfway through and I drove home in your truck looking out the window at the blurry streetlamps, frozen.

Sometimes I think about your thumbs. You'd press them against my temples and claim relief. I think I could have done it myself with similar results, but the outside touch was preferred.

We were always outside, we were always watching neon bugs land on pages.

These are just notes, just glimpses, just corridors leading away from cliches.

1 comment:

kieren said...

I love this. The way you write. I love the way you write all the time. But this, especially this. I feel like this person you wrote, narrating, could have been me.