On Time

“Change happens quickly,” you said.

I ripped the cilantro with my fingers, sprinkling little pieces of it into the bowl on your kitchen table.  Green stuck beneath my fingernails.  The smell of it clung to my skin.  The last time I made guacamole, it was Thanksgiving 2012, in another apartment that wasn’t mine.  And I had been thinking then, of how often I had made it for my mother and brothers that summer—how I would cut up a lime and put some of it in the guacamole and use the rest of it in rounds of gin and tonics that I kept pouring myself as I mixed the avocado and tomato while some song that made me sad in a good way played on my mother’s CD player in her kitchen where the floor is always a little sticky. 

I bought Coronas for you and I because now gin makes me sad in the wrong way.

Change is a haunting thing.  Change is full of everything that is gone—ghosts that hover over the beautiful now, watching and saying without speaking, “I know who you were.  I know.”  What has passed is present in its acknowledged—or unacknowledged—absence.

After the meal, we sit drinking and telling each other stories of who we were.  I think I have an understanding of who you were—a perceptive reader’s comprehension of story.  I have arranged and rearranged the narrative in my head to create a character.  And I want you to know me so I lean forward in my chair, rest my elbows on my knees and tell the stories that I never take the time to write.  We are not linear narratives.  Time mixes like metaphors.  First I am a child drinking out of my mother’s Pepsi can, which she has used as an ash tray and my mouth is full of cigarette ash.  We agree we don’t like smokers.  I joke, “I never inhaled but for a couple months I thought I looked good holding a cigarette.”  I don’t talk about walking down Second Avenue in the East Seventies, passing a cigarette back and forth with a struggling musician I used to know. I tell you about a friend who will come to visit.  And I think of how I drank wine in the Mediterranean sun and jumped naked into the sea.  I was always the type to jump in.

I called my mother the other day and told her how you give me bagels and peaches to take with me to work.  I told her how nothing really scares me anymore—not even ghosts.  And I was always haunted anyways.

Change happens quickly but when we dance together, I look at you and catch glimpses of how I thought the world would be when I was young and lost in books and dreams.  Really, you were present in your absence.