So

On the night they parted ways he took a walk by the Seine. The breeze was light and variable, the clouds low slung, shielding the light from the sky, reflecting back that cast up from below. He stood by the water and thought about his life, and it occurred to him that he desperately had to pee, that in no way shape or form could he make it to the nearest Mcdonald’s or whatever, that what he’d need to do was pee outside, in the open air, like a drunk, or a child. And this brought into his mind the backyard of his childhood, junipers and cumquats, blackberry vines gone wild. There was a small hidden corner in the yard where the children in the neighborhood had all gone to pee. It was a thing that none of them had told the adults, but it was a rite of passage, or, if not that, a sign that you were one of the group, and he remembered the long arcs of urine traveling over the branches of the juniper, their sly descent at the first splash. What he remembered mostly was the freedom that he’d felt, peeing outside into a bush, that it struck him as strange that at so young an age he’d already been aware of adult rules and expectations, and that the peeing had been an early flouting of them, a reminder of his essential independence. The fact of the matter was that he loved peeing outside. The act, when separated from fear of other hikers, or, God forbid, along the side of the road while his impatient father drummed the wheel was truly freeing. He didn’t have to aim at all. No conformity was involved in the act. It was simple relief. He wondered, as he peed onto the grass beside the Seine, if that old juniper still smelled like urine.

The regret was also wedded to our experience in time. There was no way for him to ever experience the evening, her smile, slight perfume, the feel of her shin against the small of his back, the same way again. The evening had passed, like all other evenings before it, blasé, boring, or intensely interesting, but now it was just one more small evening flotilla on the vast sea of memory, no longer set ablaze by being marked as the present. And there would be no way to travel back, no way to walk down that same street, to turn towards her with a smile and find an answer in her eyes. These things had passed, would pass, will always pass. And now he was left with the acute feeling of failure that always attends the completion of a majestic thing. He was certain that he’d be sad for weeks, and then the evening would slowly start to fade, the sails would stop gathering wind, and perhaps it might stay afloat in that deep dark sea of the mind, but it would come to mean less and less as the years went by, until it would seem like a memory of someone else’s, a thing that he’d heard once in a story.