Another Country

The thought passed and I was right back where I started, not starting.  She walked in a limp toward the car and I begged her to slow down, take her time and consider staying with the rest of us.  The limp was from a previous life abut it worked just as well in this, the plague-life, as it ever did before.  Laughter was her reply.  She was relatively good at being mad but much better at poking fun.  This was derived from her siblings, five in all.  I had never met them but her stories were straight out of a Dickens novel, complete with Tim, the youngest and, yes, tiny.

She refused to look back, instead holding her gaze stolidly toward the horizon where ships tossed cargo, one to the next, trading, arguing, compromising.  In that moment I knew I had seen her intentions.  She would not return, or if she did, not the same.

The tool shed collapsed, leaving behind broken peg-board with outlines of hammers and wrenches.  Funny how particular I once was about accounting for things.  The old life! I thought as I searched my pockets for my keys.

I was firing a lighter in the September evening, dreaming of June and time pulled back, back, back.  There I was, young, misinterpreting the meanings of words, of smiles, of frowns.  Yet to smoke.  Yet to fall out of love or crash a car.  I did not know that I would look back on bad times and see them as good.  We are all victims of yellowed-glass-nostalgia but most just consider it to be discontent.  They say the past is a separate country, one against which you can not wage proper war, but in that September evening, pulling a drag into my lungs, musing at the warring ships and prepared to let her limp out of my life, I thought No!  The past is like any other thing, easily misunderstood and easily misinterpreted.  Simply call it something else and convince those around you that it was never real.  Never really real.

Than night I turned in early without announcing it and I laughed at the news.  I laughed at an encyclopedia.  I laughed at an atlas and its crude attempt to convince me of facts I knew not to be true.  I laughed a warm, sad, elegant memory..... Lies!