I am at dinner with my best friend and his future wife,
and we are into our third bottle of wine. She is drunk
and laughing, we are drunk and happy, and I am thinking
of the girl who was once her best friend. She and I were
once together, very briefly - but long enough to introduce
my dinner partners, so that the two of them could do what
we could not: practice this domesticity, share the rhythms
of the every day. Not two days before, this brief lover of
mine and I were walking beneath a vast autumn sky,
russet with fading sun, bantering in the way two people
who should have loved, but somehow missed, banter.
Talking of childhood, and desire, and the magic of clouds.
My best friend is across the table from me now, and his
hand is on his future wife’s forearm, and they are happy
in such a plain, simple way, much the way grass looks
under noon sunshine. As it should be. Two days before,
that girl I am now dreaming of stopped me, and plucked
fruit from a vine she found, asking me if I knew what it was.
We were not six inches apart, so I could see the fine hairs of
her cheeks, her upper lip, and could smell the lilac fragrance
of her shampoo. I turned the fruit over in my hands, watched
her hands and wished to turn them over in mine. But I was
stopped by something. Fear, I suppose. Cowardice. My whole
life ahead of me. She looked at me with eyes like onyx, very
bottomless, expectant, and I smiled, and thought I should kiss
her. But I did not. And instead I took the fruit and crushed it
beneath my foot so that its outer shell broke. Inside were little
acinous globules, meaningless little seeds that fall in winter
and grow in spring, assuaging the hunger of some hungry,
mindless vermin. I picked them up, marveled at the veins of
red inside of them, and dropped them into the hands of this
girl. I think I will spend my whole life regretting I did not kiss
her. She looked down at the fruit, smiled in sorrow, realizing
then that I am a man of detachment, and deep fear. Then she
walked away. My best friend has removed his hand from his
future wife’s forearm. She is talking about something unimportant
that the three of us will forget within the hour. But we are
still laughing, and drinking, and I feel the strange warm sensation
one feels when they are happy (it comes even in the presence
of immense loss and regret): like fruit, curled inside a hand