matchbook

t’s a Saturday in the middle of July on a white porch with an old friend. Towels along the clothesline. She’s ten years younger, so I’m always asking about her sex life. Now she’s been seeing the same man for many months and turns to me with, They say when you know, you know, but how did you know?

You can be both particle and wave at once, I almost answer, both static and moving. M and I took a road trip along the green ocean in a Honda Civic although we were going nowhere. He proposed on a winter bed in a room that smelled like beer. We never spoke of it again. Uncertainty is the most human thing.

Today’s mail tells me a baby girl was born to a couple I set up years ago when we all lived downtown. I had coffee with the woman early on and she confided that he was kind and good, but she didn’t want to kiss him. They have three kids now, a little house outside the city limits. They pose on Facebook as a fivesome.

I’m having an affair with distance. The morning house is settled and known. I sip coffee, listen to the lonely call of the 4am freight train, watch the sun rise over the farm. How madly I will love any faraway thing.

I used to hoard pencils, the mechanical kind, afraid to use them up. It started the summer I was eight. I would walk to the corner market by myself, buy dried figs, bottled milk. I had a lot of freedom then; anything was possible. Once I pulled a pink pencil from the pack to admire it only to find the lead was lost, had fallen out. Maybe just holding things makes them start to disappear.

Every day, I drive by the tattoo parlor I don’t go in for the tattoo I’ll never get. I take the trash bins to the curb each Wednesday night. Maybe humans, too, are governed by Newton’s first law. They remain in motion, follow a straight line, keep doing what they’ve always done.

I tell my secrets to the grocery store clerk at checkout. Sometimes I forget what to keep to myself. Like how I thought an old love might crash my wedding to throw me off course. Or how I failed high school physics—never could calculate how fast we are moving, all the paths an object can travel, all the places it could land.