Waving Not Drowning

It's a long drive, up north. Past a myriad of small communities, tiny one horse towns with similar sounding names, ending in brook or hurst or steed. The occasional signs of big box stores and chain  groceries glow in the dark off an exit ramp in the distance. Last chance for food, shelter, gas and family size jars of dijon mustard and 46 rolls of toilet paper for 34 miles. Hawks circle above, banking, soaring, catching updrafts and hovering effortlessly above the treeline. There's rain in the air, a faint shift in barometric pressure. Should've packed a tarp. Should've packed her life, jammed her belongings into boxes and bags and thrown everything she's ever been into the rental car.  Never come back. No real sense of where she's heading or why she's leaving except it's something she can do. Volitional, for now, at least. No set schedule, no dependents, no rhyme nor reason to anything anymore. Despondency, ambivalence. These are foreign words now tatto...

It falls to the floor before she can grab it, tumbling through her fingers and bouncing across the tile before cracking and leaking onto the rug in front of the toilet. Too much glass in here: glass shelves, glass bottles, glass mirrors. Her heart stops as the scent rises up into her nose, wrapping itself around her lungs and lining the inside of her belly. Her lips swell and palms sweat, she starts to tear up and get weak in the knees. Alex. All over her, inside of her, on top of her, away from her. He insisted she have her own scent. He wanted to buy her perfume so they spent days trolling drugstores and department stores, spraying, sniffing, coughing, choking, laughing, hmm'ing and haa'ing trying to encapsulate their connection in some sort of alcohol infused watery potion. Late nights leaning into her neck, he'd lift her wrist to his face and breathe her in, all the way down to his toes. They'd compare little paper swatches, over breakfasts of coffee and half-pans o...

She wouldn't let him be who he was. Suzanne is so meticulous and rigid in her space that he felt  unwanted. Too messy and disorganized, too dynamic. Jory asked if he could have his old space back but Karyn had made her home there now and wasn't about to move again. She'd refinished the kitchen floors and resurfaced the cabinets and hooked up a portable washer. He did end up finding a really great apartment, a gorgeous 5 1/2 in the Plateau that came with appliances and had a great little garden with direct light. Rare here. More importantly, he can build his art there and make a joyful noise without feeling like a child being scolded by his mother. Strange how people suddenly become un-engaged. Jory tries to remember what it was that pulled them into each other's kinesphere, spinning tight circles in a rapidly increasing rhythm until they spun out completely, adrift in solar systems universes apart. Light fades. Meaning distorts. Truth wins out in the end, however discom...