I wish
I could have bottled, like perfume, that summer we spent on the shore. Most
evenings, we’d watch the sky fade to blue from a bench in the local park,
laughing at nearly everything we said. You used to do a voice that sounded a
bit like Donald Duck, and in that voice, you’d narrate the day’s events,
becoming increasingly enraged, as Donald is prone to do, about the slightest of
insults, the copy machine jamming or collating in an unsatisfactory manner. I
used to stare at the shape of your lips, wondering how long it would be until I
could lean over and quiet your idle chit chat with a kiss.
I read
somewhere recently about black holes, an idea that perhaps we could use them to
bore through time, the world’s most interesting drill. If I could bore through
time and have the years fly past me like trees out the window of a train, I’d
go straight back to that summer on the shore. Just when you were telling me
about your boss’s boss, and her insane little Corgi, I’d lean over to kiss you,
and then I’d wrap my arm around your shoulders and wait for evening to settle,
for the cicadas to start humming and all the birds to come down from out of the
sky, to rest their light bones on the shells of trees and rocks. Wouldn’t you?
