Unhappy contrast with these easier times, simply shifting from left foot to right, hands in our back pockets, enough to remind me that you occupy that space in my chest called murmur, enough to remind me that things weren’t always so tortured and dramatic.
This probably makes no sense, but I tend to purge the pleasant memories first, meaning my life’s not been so bad, but the storytelling’s disheartened. I have to change the tenor, because driving home the long-shadows have returned with spring’s sunlight, fluttering through the pines across your eyes, creating the illusion of a film’s countdown leader, 8…7…6…5…4…3…2…
And never before had I felt it so palpably, the flipping of the switch, the immediacy of the bottom dropping out. After so many days of flippant glee, the skies turned gray. I've never known it so physically, so clearly. Though unrelated, the plunge was preceded by a story on terrorists held in custody in faraway prisons that can never be brought to trial because we’ve tortured them. That all this torture would come to light like so many cockpit recordings.
There was a time I could use this for motivation, to skip through the halls of old memories, rapping on the doors of the demons with a witching stick, waking them and inviting them groggily out to play. But I’m interrupted momentarily. “You okay?” he asks, climbing onto the chair. “Can we go to Canada? Cameron showed me his rock collection. It had amethyst and pyrite. He got it in Canada. Can we go?” He scratches my back as I write.
Returning to back pockets. He asks so many questions about why I wasn’t happy. I don’t want that to be his impression. So I tiptoe through the halls, susurrate, reach the other end, and tell him about a trip we once took to Kansas. I sat in the back seat and watched the trees gradually disappear into a long, endless field. He leaned over the steering wheel so that she could tickle his back. They sang silly songs to make us laugh. When we reached Leavenworth, they took us to an old-style soda shop, and sat us on naugahyde bar stools.
They bought us toys at the grocery store, and we stood in line behind a man with a grocery cart full of coca-cola. We liked the new stuff better. It was sweeter. For five days we lived off ice cream cones and walks along a dusty street back to a hotel with a pool, and during the nights, we watched old movies and loved each other for the first time, albeit so quietly that we didn’t know it was happening. But we did try, and none of those attempts should count among the overall failure, but measured and remembered independently. I have no good reason for not visiting those rooms in the hall more often.
“You lived in Kansas, once, too,” I tell him. I pull out a box of old photos.
“I don’t remember. Was it nice?”
“You were very young. It was so sunny.”