3 Hours and 2 Years

H E F O U N D himself eating dinner on Fridays at 3 o’clock Pacific, when he had the choice. 6 o’clock in the East when you add 3 hours. Just a coincidence, that. Six o’clock being when he and the woman would have their Friday dinner. Escaping early from work the both of them, giggling together at that same table at that same little vegetarian restaurant.

She would be eating about now, he thought. Probably by herself this time, or with her sister. He knew there was no boyfriend right now. He chuckled to himself there in the booth at the Thai restaurant, seeing her in his mind’s eye, the story of her breakup with the separated psychologist still fresh in his mind from her telling of it, her outrage so beautiful and comical they ended up laughing about it together on the phone, two thousand four hundred and seventy six miles apart.

Fridays used to be theirs though, big kids in adult clothes, their celebration. He considered his pint of beer, the lace on the glass halfway down. Was it nostalgia to remember how good it had felt? Memory is a scalpel, we cut to fit what we see now. Dragonfly wings, colored by what you put them up against.

Two years, he told himself, spontaneously donning his sunglasses, there in the booth by the window looking out into the steady Portland rain. Two years to get over her. Then there was still dinner on Friday.

He surmised that this is what it must be like to be in AA—Most of the time you went about your normal life, safe in routine. Then you saw people you used to drink with or drove past dive bars where you had some of your greatest moments and saddest failures, and the trap sprung, and you took that gutshot and drank again--- or wanted to. Wanted to very badly.

~~~

S O T O D A Y with his sunglasses and the rain and the dragonfly wings of memory, and the ghost image of her there across from him in the booth, crouched in conspiratorially, whispering an inside joke, forking up her salad, it hit him hard and dark, dark like it’s dark at 3:AM when you can't imagine the sun ever coming back, and he felt that pull in his stomach, the one he used to get as a teenager when he thought he was in love, the one he gets now when he realizes what’s been lost.

Then he realized he had a pen, and the old Italian guy at the newsstand stayed open until 5 on Fridays. He paid the waitress and walked out and bought a card from the newsstand and sat under the awning at the coffee shop even though it was closed, and put the card down on the cold stone table and wrote, guarding it from the rain in the failing light. He finished it, sealed it, addressed it to her, and then just sat. He watched through misty eyes as the last wisps of light slipped away and the sunset turned from burnt orange to stars, and a dragonfly beat its wings and flew away.