This is what I remember about second grade

The thing that I remember most about second grade was my teacher, Mrs. Wallace. She had short black hair, cropped at her shoulders, and I'm fairly certain that she wore lacy shirts with shoulder pads underneath. Such was the style, and not much more need be said. I believe her first name was Barbara, though that was not the sort of thing that kids knew in those days, to us, she was Mrs. Wallace. 

It was, if I recall correctly, her first year of teaching. She had a teaching style that we'd refer to now as authoritarian. The type of teacher who is very strict for seemingly no purpose. Now we often say that it's because those teachers fear losing control of the class that their authoritarian nature is really a sign of weakness. However, I'll submit to you that maybe Barbara just liked her classroom quiet. 

What did I do when I was outside in second grade? I remember it being cold in the mornings, which seems almost implausible given that I grew up in the relatively mild climates of CA. But I remember it being cold and walking across the long grey stretch of cement and over to the tether ball courts. Most of the boys played tether ball, and one girl, who went on to play tennis at the U.S. open a time or two. We weren't quite old enough to be fully chauvinistic, but we were sort of vaguely aware that we were not supposed to lost to her, which we did, with an alarming frequency. I remember the tether ball being hard as a rock, spinning in its ever diminishing circles when you were close to getting tethered, or better yet, when you were smacking it time and again when you were the one doing the tethering and some kid, through the cruelty of genetics or time, was waving his hand in the air as if that could stop the inexorability of your victory. 

I remember the crunch of gravel beneath my feet as I walked on the playground. I wasn't much for swings, and I don't think we were allowed to jump out of them anyway. The yard guards were all women of Asian descent, which was strange to see in our mostly white town, though we thought nothing of it, merely noticed the difference. 

I think we must have played football some mornings. I was, in the small pond of my school a rather amazing football player. I could run really fast in a straight line and catch a football lofted towards me. I've no idea why it never occurred to the other kids to just back up a bit more when I was running at them and wait for the ball to loft down to them. Instead, they always stood a few feet away, waiting to get into a backpedal, or perform an awkward turn, when all that I had to do was run at them like the wind. And it felt like the wind to a second grader. I could feel the blades of grass, still wet with dew, as my feet sailed through them, I could see the slow spin of the football, a blotch against that wide blue sky as it sailed into my arms. I think the only thing I've ever been better at than second grade football is third grade football. 

We played soccer too, another sport at which I excelled. Again, primarily due to the fact that my competitors were somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven people. So I suppose my athletic glories, fond in memory though they are, are not of any particular note. I remember instead, the dark shape of Mrs. Wallace, writing something on the board, and engaging in a pinching contest with the boy next to me. By the end, one or the other of us was crying, and we were asked to step to the front of the room to write our names on the board. That was the one and only time that ever happened to me in school. I remember feeling mortified, naked to the world, on that ten foot walk to the white board. I remember my hand trembling with the chalk, and then I remember something else, a white hot rage at Mrs. Wallace and the boy who had pinched me. I hated them both. And as I walked back to my seat, still feeling mortified, I knew that as long as I lived I'd still hate them both, not forever, but for that moment. Shame.

The last thing I remember is that it's the first time a girl ever said, or rather wrote, I love you. She scrawled it on a white piece of paper, two stick figures holding hands on something approaching a green lawn. The sun, a yellow ball with a few stray dashes that were supposed to be manifestations of light. I did not have the heart to tell her that light comes in waves but not thinly drawn lines, nor that she'd gotten my hair color off. It was, in truth a pretty crudely drawn picture. I don't remember many other specifics except that she'd scrawled in the middle of the picture, the words, I love you, which I remember as being in red, but it may have been a different color. Her penmanship was fine, and it took me only a moment to figure out what the three words in conjunction meant. They meant that she loved me. 

And though I was in second grade at the time, I understood the meaning completely. If I accepted the paper and did anything but throw into my desk and close it, I'd be inviting myself into a life with this girl. Who, to be honest, I hadn't spoken more than four or five words in my whole life. The only thing I knew about her then was that she had impeccable taste in men, and I wouldn't even have made that joke then because I didn't know many jokes then. And yet, I could see, in the one to two seconds that it took for my face to turn bright red, an entire life that we'd spend together, holding hands on green grass underneath a warm autumnal sun. I'm saying we could have been happy. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't see it then, and so I crumpled up the paper and put it in my desk and tried to forget about her. I ran out onto the high stalks of grass and lined up at wide receiver. I could see that the two kids who were covering me were way too shallow. I was going to run past them. I was going to fly past them like the light from the sun's rays. I was going to run across the grass as though I had wings. I was going to be beautiful. I was going to fly. 

On drinking in moderation

To drink in moderation is to not drink at all. Or at the very least, to not drink properly. The trick with drinking, though it can as easily be applied to any of life's endeavors, is to do so in the right amount. Pour yourself a whiskey sour and read the evening news. Open a bottle of Shiraz and sip it as you watch something deathly unfunny on CBS. You are nearing the right amount. 

 If you drink the right amount the world takes on the quality of a very good dream--jokes are funnier, lights dimmer in a pleasing way, food plentiful and yet inessential, and the eyes of our interlocutors are deeper, more intently locked with ours. In this higher state, it becomes clear that people you'd mistaken for acquaintances, distant cousins, or people who worked a few cubes away, are really friends, people who you've just been missing because the world is shaped so imperfectly. And friends suddenly become confidants--people with whom it is safe to share the joy, the laughter, the wonder, and the deep silliness and sadness of the world. 

To have two or three drinks is to see the world in all its color. It is to see the world as malleable, and our place in it essential. No one is Mercutio after two drinks, a volatile and minor player caught in the midst of a grander affair.  Temptation, being what it is, first and foremost, tempting. Though I'll submit that it's a horrendous way to define a word. Temptation is an essential fabric woven into the universe-- an apple crunching, a wallet found untended. Thus, a drink or two more poured upon such a wonderful world would seemingly only augment the good feeling. Of course, the idea of an extra drink or two far surpasses its actual pleasure. But we have such a hard time rectifying our dreams with our realities. 

In this new state, which more sober men have called drunkenness, strange things will begin to happen. The room will be transformed a second time as Dorothy's was when she was sent to Oz. You'll realize that people who you'd thought you'd forgiven years ago for some minor slight still make you angry--an old boyfriend who made you read Dante in the original Italian, a friend who failed to call the night that you almost died, a girl who once told you that she liked your dress disingenuously. And suddenly a torrent will rush through you, a certainty that the distance between you and everyone else in the room is miles upon miles. You will see that to reach them you'd have to paddle across deep and troubled waters, and you're drunk anyway, and would capsize and drown.  

To drink in this way, heavily and with purpose, is to splinter briefly the veneer of self that we are always busily constructing. And in the morning, when the light is still pale and new you'll rise from bed and start picking the glittering pieces of yourself off the floor--that you might build anew, that old facade of the self. Inevitably, something gets put back in the wrong place and you'll wonder what's wrong. Though one could ask if the pieces ever fit together at all. 

Loneliness is wedded to existence

If I could live life over again, I'd do so as a fish. What the eff is so great about a fish, she asked me, hiding beneath the covers on a Saturday morning. I told her that I didn't know. I don't know a lot of things. Sometimes she'll ask me about the constellations or my favorite part of her body, and I'll be forced to tell her that I don't know. We watch whole episodes of Jeopardy in which I don't know a thing. How long do fish live? she asked. I was going to give her that quote from Keats about butterflies and time, but I knew I'd screw it up. Five to fifteen years, I said, without looking it up.

Tell me more about it, she said. I'm bored, bored, bored, and we have nothing else to do. Tell me about being a fish. I was going to tell her anyway. She got up to go to the bathroom, and I told her what I thought about fish over the sound of her urine. Everyone is always saying that they'd like to fly, come back as something that can soar just beneath the clouds, but I'm afraid of heights. And what if you spent the entire time in your new eagle, hawk, or house finch body, just panicking about flying. You know, just thinking, "Shit, am I flying or am I falling." Just flapping your wings like some kind of insane bird because you're afraid that if you don't you're going to fall to your death. Imagine feeling like you were going to die all the time. I don't think I could come back as a bird.

Logically then, she said, returning to the bedroom, not wearing her top, wouldn't you be scared then of being a fish? Doesn't it follow that you'd constantly be living in fear of drowning? Can you imagine swimming around wondering where your next breath is going to come from?

I told her that maybe I'd be a whale, but then I started wondering whether whales were terrified over where their next breath would come from. And if you think about whales, swimming in all that damn ocean, the overwhelming feeling that I get is one of loneliness. Whales make me lonely. But then, sometimes commercials about fabric softeners where the mother is hugging their child's clothes before they go away to school make me lonely. Maybe loneliness is a precondition of existence.

You're off topic, she said, rolling onto her side, propping her head--her hair falling like bits of light on water. I'd be a fish because the world is covered mostly by water. Just think, if you were bored and wanted a change, you could move further away than Australia. You could move to the Mariana trench and no one would ever find you. She said that I had a basic misunderstanding of fish that she'd watched something on the Discovery Channel about certain types of fish that live at the bottom of the ocean vs. the top of the ocean. You either had a lantern on your head and lived at the bottom or were kind of colorful and lived at the top and were possibly eaten by a whale. You kind of had to pick one or the other. You couldn't be one type of fish and then suddenly change your stripes and become another. I told her that I'd seen fish do this very thing, and she said she was speaking metaphorically. She was so lovely that morning, so lovely.

I told her that she'd convinced me that I didn't want to come back as a fish. Why are you so lovely? I asked her. She was looking at her phone, only half-listening. I'm lovely because I work at it, she said. I work and work and work at it. I work at everything. And to what end? she said, looking out our dusty window at a city full of people who don't know anything about us.

Within a month of two she'd moved all of her things to Tuscon. I sold the place that we'd been living in and started working a night shift as a janitor in an aquarium. At first, all I did was mop the floors and walk past the tanks. After a few weeks I'd started to stand at the edge of the glass, peering in at the fish going on about their business, whatever the hell fish business was. Finally, when I'd been there a few months, after I'd mopped the floors, I'd turn out the last of the lights, shed my clothes, and swim inside the tanks. The fish feel strange at first, harder in ways than you might imagine. Something about water makes you feel as though they should slide by, but they are scaly, rough. But I should tell you that after a while the fish and the rays start to get used to you, and I found, that by going in night after night, I was able to stay under for longer and longer. I thought, as I stared from inside the tank out at my clothes, my hand up against the glass--smooth, cool--that eventually I'd stay down in this tank forever. Some day, a group of school children or business men in fancy suits would walk by the tank and point to me, and I wouldn't be the loneliest person on the face of the earth. I'd be a fish swimming in a tank, preparing myself for whatever comes next. 

The chapter that is ostensibly about the train ride, though I'll add more at some point in the future.

Years later he wondered what his life would have been like if he'd have missed that train. The morning that he was to leave his uncle's he'd woken up early, looked out the window at the streaks of sunlight pouring through a thin layer of cirrus onto a field of wildflowers and began to feel nostalgic for the time he'd spent in the north. The light was colder here, offering only some small bit of warmth. And yet, like gold, its scarcity somehow made its presence more valuable. Yes, strange though it may have sounded to the people from his town down south, he'd miss the subtle changing of the leaves that happened earlier here, the way the songbirds could be heard more clearly when all the leaves were cleared away. He'd miss his uncle's laugh, guttural and full of a quiet mirth.

He was down in front of the house that sprawling house, with a grand front porch adorned by two tables and several white rocking chairs, and above, where he and his uncle had smoked cigarettes and discussed the day's events, another porch, where you could look out over the sea of grass at fireflies winking into and out of existence, in good time. He hugged his aunt and uncle goodbye, making promises to visit them again someday soon. His uncle would die a few weeks later of pneumonia and this would be there final parting, but the event held no such solemnity. They had taken pleasure in one another's company and were sad to part ways, but sure that they'd share a drink and some laughter again at some point in time.

The coach arrived promptly by seven thirty, driven by a young man with coal black hair, who had to keep brushing it away from his face with his right hand while driving. For some reason he felt lethargic and sad, weighed down by the impossibility of how long the coach ride to the station would be. It was only an hour. But he imagined spending the hour in tense silence, waiting for he and the coachman to talk. And the idea of that time stretched before him like some unending stretch of water. It appeared as vast as the ocean. He liked people and liked them to like him. What he needed to do was ask a question to pass the time.
"How long have you been doing this?" he asked the coach man.

"Not long," he answered, without turning his head but merely tilting it, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. The road was muddy. The tracks were well worn and the grass on the sides was pushed down and spattered with bits of mud from the spokes of wheels.

"Is your family from around here?" he asked.

"Nearby."

"What brought  you to this job?"

"This job is as good as any other."

"Do you like the horses?"

"Not really. Don't care much for them."

He wanted the young man to be happy in his job. He had wanted him to say that he had an abiding love in rubbing down the horses and driving strangers around to the station or from house to house. Unpleasantness was the sort of thing that burdened him.

The wheel broke a mile out from the train. It had started to rain, a thin mist, like the mist of water falling upon stone from a great height. The sky was leaden and small. He thought that he would not make his train. He'd be making the same journey on the next day, engaging some other coachman in polite conversation to pass the hour. Life was cyclical.

A clatter of wheels twenty minutes later signaled the arrival of another coach. He signaled to the driver by doffing his hat, and, after some brief discussion, his goods were transferred, and he was sitting on the top of a coach with another gentleman, not knowing that his life had just changed. Along the way, the bits of sunshine filtered through the layer of clouds and a large gust of wind began pushing them to the east. By the time he'd reached the station it was almost clear. An omen, he'd think to himself, years later, as he sat on the side of a ship bound for Africa, watching the gulls attack the waves.

He had a few minutes before the train was to arrive, and he spent them scanning the crowd around him. In the distance, a puff of smoke could be seen, trailing low and blue-black against the winter green of the hills. The sky above the remaining clouds was a mix of green and yellow, something in between, as if the world he saw was being viewed through a thin veil. At first glance he did not recognize anyone on the platform. This was not an unusual state of affairs. He knew only a few people who lived in the north, and he hadn't expected to see any of them today. He was moderately pleased to not find anyone he knew. It meant he could spend the ride reading his book in peace and quiet, passing the time in reverie, constructing what the past months had meant for his future.

When the train arrived, he looked up from his watch and briefly caught her eyes, which were lifted from her book. She flicked them away instantly, and he felt that perhaps the moment had passed. They boarded the train, and he sat in the second row, she in the third, opposite him in the aisle. He opened his bag and set about reading the morning news. The countryside started passing by, lilies of the valley, gorse, flecks of heather covered in meadow foam with white blossoms.

            He tried to focus on his reading, but he was dimly aware of her as he read, conscious that he had snubbed her, or that she had snubbed him. He turned quickly to catch her eye, but she was reading still. As he turned back to the window he was certain that she looked up, and he could feel her eyes on the back of his neck. He used his right arm to cushion his head in his hand and shifted his body slightly to face her. He glanced up again, but she was reading again, as if it were her only care in the world.

            For a full five minutes he read without moving. He was dimly aware that she too was reading, light skipped through the window splashing on the floor. He found it nearly impossible to read. His eyes skimmed over the words, not comprehending their meaning

Her nose was long and angular. Overly long, in his estimation. But what precisely had he been reading? Something about the nature of business and perhaps time? He glanced up from his book and staid his gaze; she met his eyes. Her eyes were dark and hard. There is a difference between looking at a person and truly taking them in. 

 In the middle of her otherwise smooth brow was a slight furrow, delicately and symmetrically carved. The furrow did not look natural but rather, it was clear that it was affect of looking intently at things as she'd looked at the essays of Montaigne when she'd snubbed him at his father's house. The furrow then in some imperceptible way began to change his perception of her, making her slightly more palatable. She was not aloof but intense. Or perhaps she was aloof, but it was born out of intensity. 

She crossed her legs and pulled them up to her chest, then looked out the window at the hills passing by. He crossed his arms and stared down at his book. He put his finger down on the page, tracing the words as if he were a child learning to read, a gesture that she'd make fun of him for with delight over the next few months. "You were just learning to read," she'd say. "How could I resist the chance to form such a surprisingly young mind." 

He gave up again on the book a moment later and looked up at her. She was staring right back at him, and she smiled. "Charlotte," she said, extending her thin hand to grasp his. He was conscious of how delicate her fingers looked, and yet, how strong their grip was. She played piano, quite well, though she often denied it on company. The beginning of the conversation was slow. She asked him what he was reading, and he said that he couldn't really tell her, that he'd been staring at the book without comprehending any of the words. She said that it happened to her all the time. "It's strange, she said, looking out the window as she spoke, "how your mind can be so distant, miles or years away from where you are. That's strange right? To be somewhere physically, but to be inhabiting it like a ghost." 

 She started talking to him about her fiancee, the interesting things he was learning in the school of medicine. Something of The Origin of Species hung over their conversation. It came out that she was a skeptic rather than a believer. He found her very strange.

Meanwhile, he talked for a while of Jane and his job in the country, working at law. He told her of the fireflies and the trees that shed their powdery puffs into the night sky, slivers of moonlight laying low across the river. Or rather, he evoked them. What he meant to say was that he'd felt a kind of peace in the north that he'd never thought he'd experience elsewhere. He wasn't thinking as he spoke with her that the things he was saying were intimate, rather, she seemed to draw them out of him without any effort in part. He found himself wanting to tell her everything about those nights on the veranda, every last detail because somehow she was managing to convey that she cared that she was deeply interested in the sound of the wind through oaks and the crickets lying in the dry grass. She asked quick and pointed questions, and kept eye contact for longer than he was used to. In the end, he felt wrung out by her, as if her were a wash cloth. 

When they got off the train it was as acquaintances now rather than as strangers. As soon as they parted ways he nearly forgot their entire conversation because all he could think of was Jane. He wanted not to tell her all the things he'd been thinking the past months as he had with Charlotte. What he wanted was to behold her, to stand across a room and watch the way bits of light seemed to cling to bits of stray hair. 

The wind started to kick leaves across the street. A pair of horses dragged a cart across a muddy road. In the distance he could hear the sound of a piano being played, somewhat poorly. He had missed being at home. He'd start by telling her that he missed her, and then he'd tell her that 

The Beginning of the train ride

Years later he wondered what his life would have been like if he'd have missed that train. The morning that he was to leave his uncle's he'd woken up early, looked out the window at the streaks of sunlight pouring through a thin layer of cirrus onto a field of wildflowers and began to feel nostalgic for the time he'd spent in the north. The light was colder here, offering only some small bit of warmth. And yet, like gold, its scarcity somehow made its presence more valuable. Yes, strange though it may have sounded to the people from his town down south, he'd miss the subtle changing of the leaves that happened earlier here, the way the songbirds could be heard more clearly when all the leaves were cleared away. He'd miss his uncle's laugh, guttural and full of a quiet mirth.

He was down in front of the house that sprawling house, with a grand front porch adorned by two tables and several white rocking chairs, and above, where he and his uncle had smoked cigarettes and discussed the day's events, another porch, where you could look out over the sea of grass at fireflies winking into and out of existence, in good time. He hugged his aunt and uncle goodbye, making promises to visit them again someday soon. His uncle would die a few weeks later of pneumonia and this would be there final parting, but the event held no such solemnity. They had taken pleasure in one another's company and were sad to part ways, but sure that they'd share a drink and some laughter again at some point in time.

The coach arrived promptly by seven thirty, driven by a young man with coal black hair, who had to keep brushing it away from his face with his right hand while driving. For some reason he felt lethargic and sad, weighed down by the impossibility of how long the coach ride to the station would be. It was only an hour. But he imagined spending the hour in tense silence, waiting for he and the coachman to talk. And the idea of that time stretched before him like some unending stretch of water. It appeared as vast as the ocean. He liked people and liked them to like him. What he needed to do was ask a question to pass the time.
"How long have you been doing this?" he asked the coach man.

"Not long," he answered, without turning his head but merely tilting it, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. The road was muddy. The tracks were well worn and the grass on the sides was pushed down and spattered with bits of mud from the spokes of wheels.

"Is your family from around here?" he asked.

"Nearby."

"What brought  you to this job?"

"This job is as good as any other."

"Do you like the horses?"

"Not really. Don't care much for them."

He wanted the young man to be happy in his job. He had wanted him to say that he had an abiding love in rubbing down the horses and driving strangers around to the station or from house to house. Unpleasantness was the sort of thing that burdened him.

The wheel broke a mile out from the train. It had started to rain, a thin mist, like the mist of water falling upon stone from a great height. The sky was leaden and small. He thought that he would not make his train. He'd be making the same journey on the next day, engaging some other coachman in polite conversation to pass the hour. Life was cyclical.

A clatter of wheels twenty minutes later signaled the arrival of another coach. He signaled to the driver by doffing his hat, and, after some brief discussion, his goods were transferred, and he was sitting on the top of a coach with another gentleman, not knowing that his life had just changed.

A place where they serve the good stuff

I'm currently deploying all of the known tricks of man to ward off this ennui that is bearing down on me like a locomotive. I know when I start wishing that the weather was colder that things have gone astray. I wander outside near sunset and try to identify the various colors and shapes of clouds. The clouds are puffs of smoke. The clouds are cartoon ghosts. The clouds are black cloth covering the bright blue body of the horizon. The clouds are a certain distance away from me that is actually identifiable, and it's almost impossible to imagine how much closer they are to me than the stars. The clouds are suffused with orange light. Planes drop through the clouds like water arrived down a drain into the vast underworld. None of them are entirely correct. Le mot juste escapes me, dear Flaubert.

I go through these periods as a plane passes through clouds. No, no, forget the clouds. I imagine that things should be different than they are. The thought itself is nebulous, it lacks any real substance like the ghosts of clouds that hover on the fading horizon of orange and blue. The clouds are the color of spent coal. A school of orange fish are swimming through the clouds. Is it so hard to imagine that the whole world exists as a figment in my imagination? Yes, I suppose so. Is it so hard to imagine it as God's?

I find myself unable to stay in one place. I wander around looking for something. I do not know what the something is, but I know that if I find it nothing will change. But the illusion of change keeps me wandering around on it's nonexistent trail. I wander in my mind in search of things. Time does not heal all wounds. Time makes a fool of us all.

5,000 monkeys slamming on the keys would eventually come up with Shakespeare, but it would take them a hell of a long time. I'd rather just get it from William along with the bed. The idea for the movie "Midnight in Paris" is sound. The illusory dream that one's life was meant to be lived elsewhere. That somehow meaning would be able to be crafted in a different place. Perhaps, perhaps not. The life span and drudgery of past centuries would perhaps leave those unhappy spirits in a better state, and if not that, dead, which tends to put things to rest.

I keep trying to come up with ways of forgetting. Okay, I was briefly distracted from the world by joining twitter and reading a quote by Elizabeth Warren. I would vote for Elizabeth Warren if she ran for the presidency. Anyhow, in the heady and intoxicating land of joining twitter and fretting over candidates I've overcome my desire to define clouds.

It was at that time in my life that I was given over to the sort of nostalgia that cripples a man, turns him into a piece of gd jelly. I was young and stupid. Those old two handmaidens that are inextricably linked. I loved a girl, and she didn't love me. At that point in time I thought that the difference was important. And so I'd walk the streets at night in hopes of running into her. I had no idea where she lived, just a sort of approximation of the neighborhood. I often mistook old women carrying umbrellas for her. It is the sort of mistake that a mind unhinged by love makes.

Sometimes I'd stop in at a corner bar and pretend to watch the television while unrepentant drunks smoked and talked about women at the bar. The bar was dark and smelled like all bars everywhere. Like old cigarette ash, spilled drinks, and failure. None of the regulars ever took notice of me. I suppose this is a longish way of telling you how I got the cat that is currently sitting in your lap, but I figured you and I had time. Not the sort of time that that gd younger version of myself did, squandering his hours in a corner bar, in aquarium light, looking for a woman to love.

Do you want tea? I can't drink the good stuff anymore, too many good things happen that turn out later to have been bad. Nah. She never came in, and after a few months I forget what she looked like. I came across her in the super market months later, she was wearing a beret, and she had an earring in her nose, really had gone to hell. I wanted to go back and kick that earlier version of myself in the face for spending all those hours on lonely streets, but then again, I wouldn't have found this boon companion if I hadn't loved that woman, so I walked up to her and shook her hand and thanked her for the cat. Nah. She didn't even remember my name.

The chapter that is ostensibly about the train ride, though I'll add more at some point in the future.

Years later he wondered what his life would have been like if he'd have missed that train. The morning that he was to leave his uncle's he'd woken up early, looked out the window at the streaks of sunlight pouring through a thin layer of cirrus onto a field of wildflowers and began to feel nostalgic for the time he'd spent in the north. The light was colder here, offering only some small bit of warmth. And yet, like gold, its scarcity somehow made its presence more valuable. Yes, strange though it may have sounded to the people from his town down south, he'd miss the subtle changing of the leaves that happened earlier here, the way the songbirds could be heard more clearly when all the leaves were cleared away. He'd miss his uncle's laugh, guttural and full of a quiet mirth.

He was down in front of the house that sprawling house, with a grand front porch adorned by two tables and several white rocking chairs, and above, where he and his uncle had smoked cigarettes and discussed the day's events, another porch, where you could look out over the sea of grass at fireflies winking into and out of existence, in good time. He hugged his aunt and uncle goodbye, making promises to visit them again someday soon. His uncle would die a few weeks later of pneumonia and this would be there final parting, but the event held no such solemnity. They had taken pleasure in one another's company and were sad to part ways, but sure that they'd share a drink and some laughter again at some point in time.

The coach arrived promptly by seven thirty, driven by a young man with coal black hair, who had to keep brushing it away from his face with his right hand while driving. For some reason he felt lethargic and sad, weighed down by the impossibility of how long the coach ride to the station would be. It was only an hour. But he imagined spending the hour in tense silence, waiting for he and the coachman to talk. And the idea of that time stretched before him like some unending stretch of water. It appeared as vast as the ocean. He liked people and liked them to like him. What he needed to do was ask a question to pass the time.
"How long have you been doing this?" he asked the coach man.

"Not long," he answered, without turning his head but merely tilting it, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. The road was muddy. The tracks were well worn and the grass on the sides was pushed down and spattered with bits of mud from the spokes of wheels.

"Is your family from around here?" he asked.

"Nearby."

"What brought  you to this job?"

"This job is as good as any other."

"Do you like the horses?"

"Not really. Don't care much for them."

He wanted the young man to be happy in his job. He had wanted him to say that he had an abiding love in rubbing down the horses and driving strangers around to the station or from house to house. Unpleasantness was the sort of thing that burdened him.

The wheel broke a mile out from the train. It had started to rain, a thin mist, like the mist of water falling upon stone from a great height. The sky was leaden and small. He thought that he would not make his train. He'd be making the same journey on the next day, engaging some other coachman in polite conversation to pass the hour. Life was cyclical.

A clatter of wheels twenty minutes later signaled the arrival of another coach. He signaled to the driver by doffing his hat, and, after some brief discussion, his goods were transferred, and he was sitting on the top of a coach with another gentleman, not knowing that his life had just changed. Along the way, the bits of sunshine filtered through the layer of clouds and a large gust of wind began pushing them to the east. By the time he'd reached the station it was almost clear. An omen, he'd think to himself, years later, as he sat on the side of a ship bound for Africa, watching the gulls attack the waves.

He had a few minutes before the train was to arrive, and he spent them scanning the crowd around him. In the distance, a puff of smoke could be seen, trailing low and blue-black against the winter green of the hills. The sky above the remaining clouds was a mix of green and yellow, something in between, as if the world he saw was being viewed through a thin veil. At first glance he did not recognize anyone on the platform. This was not an unusual state of affairs. He knew only a few people who lived in the north, and he hadn't expected to see any of them today. He was moderately pleased to not find anyone he knew. It meant he could spend the ride reading his book in peace and quiet, passing the time in reverie, constructing what the past months had meant for his future.

When the train arrived, he looked up from his watch and briefly caught her eyes, which were lifted from her book. She flicked them away instantly, and he felt that perhaps the moment had passed. They boarded the train, and he sat in the second row, she in the third, opposite him in the aisle. He opened his bag and set about reading the morning news. The countryside started passing by, lilies of the valley, gorse, flecks of heather covered in meadow foam with white blossoms.

            He tried to focus on his reading, but he was dimly aware of her as he read, conscious that he had snubbed her, or that she had snubbed him. He turned quickly to catch her eye, but she was reading still. As he turned back to the window he was certain that she looked up, and he could feel her eyes on the back of his neck. He used his right arm to cushion his head in his hand and shifted his body slightly to face her. He glanced up again, but she was reading again, as if it were her only care in the world.

            For a full five minutes he read without moving. He was dimly aware that she too was reading, light skipped through the window splashing on the floor. He found it nearly impossible to read. His eyes skimmed over the words, not comprehending their meaning

Her nose was long and angular. Overly long, in his estimation. But what precisely had he been reading? Something about the nature of business and perhaps time? He glanced up from his book and staid his gaze; she met his eyes. Her eyes were dark and hard. There is a difference between looking at a person and truly taking them in.

 In the middle of her otherwise smooth brow was a slight furrow, delicately and symmetrically carved. The furrow did not look natural but rather, it was clear that it was affect of looking intently at things as she'd looked at the essays of Montaigne when she'd snubbed him at his father's house. The furrow then in some imperceptible way began to change his perception of her, making her slightly more palatable. She was not aloof but intense. Or perhaps she was aloof, but it was born out of intensity. 

She crossed her legs and pulled them up to her chest, then looked out the window at the hills passing by. He crossed his arms and stared down at his book. He put his finger down on the page, tracing the words as if he were a child learning to read, a gesture that she'd make fun of him for with delight over the next few months. "You were just learning to read," she'd say. "How could I resist the chance to form such a surprisingly young mind." 

He gave up again on the book a moment later and looked up at her. She was staring right back at him, and she smiled. "Charlotte," she said, extending her thin hand to grasp his. He was conscious of how delicate her fingers looked, and yet, how strong their grip was. She played piano, quite well, though she often denied it on company. The beginning of the conversation was slow. She asked him what he was reading, and he said that he couldn't really tell her, that he'd been staring at the book without comprehending any of the words. She said that it happened to her all the time. "It's strange, she said, looking out the window as she spoke, "how your mind can be so distant, miles or years away from where you are. That's strange right? To be somewhere physically, but to be inhabiting it like a ghost." 

 She started talking to him about her fiancee, the interesting things he was learning in the school of medicine. Something of The Origin of Species hung over their conversation. It came out that she was a skeptic rather than a believer. He found her very strange.

Meanwhile, he talked for a while of Jane and his job in the country, working at law. He told her of the fireflies and the trees that shed their powdery puffs into the night sky, slivers of moonlight laying low across the river. Or rather, he evoked them. What he meant to say was that he'd felt a kind of peace in the north that he'd never thought he'd experience elsewhere. He wasn't thinking as he spoke with her that the things he was saying were intimate, rather, she seemed to draw them out of him without any effort in part. He found himself wanting to tell her everything about those nights on the veranda, every last detail because somehow she was managing to convey that she cared that she was deeply interested in the sound of the wind through oaks and the crickets lying in the dry grass. She asked quick and pointed questions, and kept eye contact for longer than he was used to. In the end, he felt wrung out by her, as if her were a wash cloth. 

When they got off the train it was as acquaintances now rather than as strangers. As soon as they parted ways he nearly forgot their entire conversation because all he could think of was Jane. He wanted not to tell her all the things he'd been thinking the past months as he had with Charlotte. What he wanted was to behold her, to stand across a room and watch the way bits of light seemed to cling to bits of stray hair. 

The wind started to kick leaves across the street. A pair of horses dragged a cart across a muddy road. In the distance he could hear the sound of a piano being played, somewhat poorly. He had missed being at home. He'd start by telling her that he missed her, and then he'd tell her that 

The party continues

The party did't wind down for hours. People drank champagne from tables covered in white lace. They ate potatoes au gratin, blackberries, and bits of toast from silver dishes. And they talked of the weather as people have talked of the weather since the dawn of time. Someone would assert that the winter had been cold, unusually cold, and someone else would say that they'd been through one a decade or two before that had been colder. The older women who were bores would talk of when they were young.  The younger ones, who were still bores, but at least less so, would ask the young people about their lives, who were often no more interested in sharing them than a bird is in giving up its eggs. But one must pass the time.

He talked to Mrs. Winslow for fifteen minutes about the state of her garden. She was hoping that the new flowers would draw hummingbirds and butterflies. He was hopeful on her behalf that the birds of paradise and hyacinths would draw hummingbirds and butterflies. He knew very little about plants and a great deal about old women. They liked being listened to. Mrs. Winslow had a very large upper lip that protruded far over her thin bottom lip, giving her the appearance of a bird with a very large beak. She had silver hair, which was tied back rather severely. He'd learned to garden from her husband when he was a boy of five or so. He'd dug up carrots, picked blueberries and helped to plant cucumbers and squash. He'd learned that the key to gardening was in loving them, or so the old husband had told him. He was thinking of this while talking to Mrs. Winslow, remembering her husband, dead at least ten years now. He was thinking that he'd liked Mr. Winslow's hands immensely, the rough hair on his knuckles, the short stubby fingers, his finger nails covered in dirt. He could not remember anything else about him, except perhaps that he wore a hat, though that could be someone else. What would anyone remember of him when he died? he thought, rather abstractedly. He was talking about butterflies.

For a good portion of the evening he watched Jane from across the room. She spent time speaking with the wives and mothers of the neighborhood. She laughed readily, throwing her head back and revealing her pale and long neck. After a time she crossed the room to talk with Mr. Denby and his daughter, who put down her copy of Montaigne to speak with her. The two of them seemed to be talking and laughing in a way that he'd been unable to manage with her. It was one of Jane's many pleasant characteristics, she could bring out the best in anyone.

He returns via train

And finally, after a brief attempt at looking out the window only, they began to talk. She started talking to him about her fiancee, the interesting things he was learning in the school of medicine. Something of The Origin of Species hung over their conversation. It came out that she was a skeptic rather than a believer He found her very strange. 

Meanwhile, he talked for a while of Jane and his job in the country, working at law. He told her of the fireflies and the trees that shed their powdery puffs into the night sky, slivers of moonlight laying low across the river. Or rather, he evoked them. What he meant to say was that he'd felt a kind of peace in the north that he'd never thought he'd experience elsewhere. He wasn't thinking as he spoke with her that the things he was saying were intimate, rather, she seemed to draw them out of him without any effort in part. He found himself wanting to tell her everything about those nights on the veranda, every last detail because somehow she was managing to convey that she cared that she was deeply interested in the sound of the wind through oaks and the crickets lying in the dry grass. She asked quick and pointed questions, and kept eye contact for longer than he was used to. In the end, he felt wrung out by her, as if her were a wash cloth. 

When they got off the train it was as acquaintances now rather than as strangers. As soon as they parted ways he nearly forgot their entire conversation because all he could think of was Jane. He wanted not to tell her all the things he'd been thinking the past months as he had with Charlotte. What he wanted was to behold her, to stand across a room and watch the way bits of light seemed to cling to bits of stray hair. 

The wind started to kick leaves across the street. A pair of horses dragged a cart across a muddy road. In the distance he could hear the sound of a piano being played, somewhat poorly. He had missed being at home. He'd start by telling her that he missed her, and then he'd tell her that