Let's speak of the past
I’m on the C reading about someone about ten years older than you were, someone with the life I think you maybe wished you’d lived, and this makes me sad for the life you did live.
I’m remembering now the songs you’d send me, how good they felt to listen to, how happy they made me, even though I think some of them weren’t that great. But they sounded like you, so I liked them. Some of them were truly great, but I think I would have liked — I think I would like — anything that sounded like you.
I’m listening to Wagonwheel Blues, did I ever show you that record? “Buenos Aires Beach” is the song. Let’s speak of the past in the future-perfect tense.
We did that, sometimes, speak of your past, the one in which you repeatedly slept with your friend’s girlfriend, got uninvited from their wedding, framed the note they sent you saying so, hung it in your bathroom. I learned more from the scorn in your voice than I did from the facts of the story itself.
I always learned more from the way you said things than what you said, like the way you’d skate around details when pinning them down would reveal some truth you weren’t ready to deal with.
For some reason I just remembered the first time I ever saw you
For some reason I just found this picture I took of E holding the loaf of bread you sent
For some reason I was just laughing at this joke you made the other day
When did you teach yourself to say “for some reason” instead of “because I love you”? That’s the past I wish we’d spoken of, the one in which vaguenesses displace the specificities you’ll spend the rest of forever hiding from, pretending you don’t know things you do know, like you can keep the cancer from spreading by ignoring the results of a positive biopsy.
I almost just missed my stop because I was typing this instead of paying attention to where I am. There are two things that can keep me from noticing the world around me; one of them is reading and the other is writing. In the past I would’ve also said listening to or playing music but now I think of those things as augmented reality as opposed to alternate reality.
There is a man in front of me, across the train car, leaned all the way over, his head in his hands, a water bottle pressed onto his forehead, one of those polyester cape things they give you when you finish a road race stuffed between him and the side panel on the seats. He’s just run the marathon.
I wonder briefly if I wish I were him, keeled over even lower now with the cape wrapped around him, rocking back and forth out of sync with the train’s own swaying, head hanging limp, knees together, feet pointed slightly toward each other. It must feel good to have all these people on the side of the road cheer you on the way to your virtually guaranteed decimation, to see their smiling faces as you push yourself to near-ruin. It must feel good to then have all these people on the train bear witness to your exhaustion and pain, watch you on the journey that starts after the main event has ended. I’ve run road races but nothing longer than 10K, a friendly distance after which you can be anywhere from modestly tired to mildly energized. A marathon is a brush with death, and everyone stands there urging you to keep inching closer. I wonder how much of himself he had to build up in order to then spend it this way.