Waving Not Drowning

From a distance her legs look like two savoury plump sausages in technicolour flip flops with thinner links for arms. Long blonde hair cascading from under a baseball cap with a ridiculously oversized brim, neon orange-armed Wayfarer knock offs and an off the shoulder, deliberately distressed tank top with a faded picture of The Velvet Underground and Nico's Andy Warhol album cover, likely bought brand new last week in the market at one of the dozens of vintage shops lining the streets. Sharon catches her breath- it is like walking directly into the  mirror version of her 15 year-old self circa 1987. She wonders if maybe those are her actual cut off high waisted 501's, one of the four pairs she finally Goodwilled last season after coming to terms with the fact that the '80's never worked on her hourglass shaped rubenesque body. She is a 40's girl, bred in her bones, and so is this pretty young thing walking straight at her, oblivious to everything except her smartph...

She makes him grin. He makes her smile, then a sad ache reverberates from her heart and travels out the ends of her fingertips, shooting invisible tendrils of longing across the continent reaching out to reattach themselves to the core of his being, his soul, his desire for her, as if they had never been pulled apart. Loss is a funny thing. She surfs waves of emotion trying to catch the top of the curl with precision timing so she can ride the wave in for hours, revel in what seems like days, until it dissipates into a foamy brine on the shoreline. On days she can't catch the wave or gets sucked into the undertow and crashes onto the rocks below, tossing and turning in the roiling surf, those days take forever to recover from. He's been gone for months, but never really out of her mind. The wake is half over but she lingers. It's too soon to say goodbye yet way too far past welcome home. She'll pick up a book, put on a record, stroll through the streets of Chinatown and...

That night when we were twenty one and you had left Patty and I left Mark and we borrrowed your mom's van and we drove as far as we could go on seven dollars and forty five cents worth of change we cobbled together from various coat pockets, bottoms of purses and couch cushions, and we drove as far as we could til we reached half a tank of gas and ate soft serve ice cream cones with a chocolate dip, wandered ancient general stores, spoke secrets out loud and promised each other the world- that was the night you asked me to marry you and I said yes but really meant but not now because I was young and we were crazy and I was terrified of the reality but in love with the romantic idealism and thought that yes would somehow magically solve our life's problems, which seemed monumental and all consuming and would irrevocably change the rest of our lives. That night, that's the night I play over and over in my head, every day, every minute of every day, since I saw you on the stre...

Aw man, crap, no. Nononononono....big exhale, that's right, just breathe out....Adam was having a minor coronory. He hadn't seen Jane in years. Wait, what was she doing back in town? That couldn't have been her, no. Holy guacomole it's a tofu inferno. Woah. Adam realized he had come to a dead stop in the middle of the sidewalk at 5 pm, a downstream barricade in the midst of the upflow of mad commuter traffic heading frantically towards the suburban trains. A domino effect of bouncing businessmen, briefcases flailing, suit jackets creasing, stacked up behind him. Sorry, sorrysorrysorry. Damn. Adam stepped flush to the tower wall, a pink hued shade of granite, still emanating heat from basking in the midday sun. He searched down the stream of bobbing heads and shoulders shuffling, trying to remember what Jane was wearing, if it really was Jane. That gait, the set of her shoulders, the way she created a bubble around her, even in a crush of bodies. She claimed space. Eight...