Passing

I cannot construct it from memory. I know because I thought of her skirt as beige, and it wasn’t beige, which I also knew, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps, if everything had been as it should, her skirt would have been beige. You know what I mean. The architecture of the sky was purple and rivaled even the Duomo, and the mountain was purple rimmed, clouds were inventing themselves as if they were children playing wild games in some infinitely blued sky.

It’s strange, this archeology we carry out in our minds, trekking through the Badlands to collect bits of bone, gluing them together and calling them dinosaurs. We choose to call it a life, a self, a summer, a smell of certain perfume, wintergreen trees, portals of light laid out across avenues of darkness, the white polka dots on a black dress, certain creases in her forehead, toads croaking at us from the ditches while we talked about the future, stars overhead still uncaring, and here I am again standing at the doorway to the past.

I was sitting at a table and drinking white wine in the late afternoon. We were watching basketball and talking about the women we’d never loved.  You told me that you were only happy when you were watching other people be productive. So you followed around maids and janitors, watched them sweep floors and empty trash cans. You told me that it brought you a strange kind of peace, that you knew it was the closest you’d ever get to doing anything yourself, watching her weathered hands caressing the side of an old mop.

Out west, far away from here, but still tethered to my memory, the wind is steady from the dark sea. Somewhere nearby, a young Matthew Arnold is writing a poem about armies clashing on distant shores, and beneath the sheets, her pale shoulder exposed, sleeps his poor wife. What a strange thing is mankind, is a cricket’s chirp, is the sediment in a cheap bottle of wine, is a shaft of light curling into a dark room, is the image of you that I can still conjure up as warm breath upon a windowpane.