there was only one moment this entire week i rememebered you at all. i think it was friday night right around dinner time. either we'd all just finished or just started eating a yellow coconut curry, though Alfred'd made mine special as per Dave's request, cause i don't like coconut milk...
I was walking, i think holding a cup of beer and that song "we belong" came over christy's little ipod speakers.
* * *
"i don't know how to explain it, but i have a weird attraction to john."
"me too." i stick my paper heart shaped pasties to the wall. "i can't talk about it though, because it's so weird. i can't even tell jess, cause, he's like her dad."
"yeah."
* * *
you little girl are so talented! says aunt melisa. she and apryl contemplate a potential new memeber to the Silly Dilly Band and i practice the courteous decline in my head.
they'd lauged at the quips between lyrical lines because, i'm too nervous to really sing "how can i tell you" (this is kind of ironic. or anti-ironic?) without skipping entire verses...
the performance yields more praise than the previous night's strip tease to journey's "Faithfully"--then, the former took place infront of the entire family who missed the reference to What I Did Last Night. and also because it was mixed among cornball poems and discomfortingly atonal frank sinatra covers sung a capella.
"you're so funny!" they say, and i repeat again the reply that "i didn't really mean to be." my vision was to speak through the wise words of Cat Sevens ("you may recognize this from the diamond commercial" amid some lines, they ate that s**t up) speaking through me my very inability to express my love for jess, and dave, and their love for each other, and my love for their love for each other; but alas, my muse slept.
when i return to my seat, john puts his arms around me and kisses the side of my head. i feel like a pinata about to burst.
* * *
"You have to complicate everything with men!" dad jokes, but actually he has no idea. mixed up, he leaves "singles.net" pages open on the computer, talks loudly with marylee about sex, and assumes my alone time with mattE means we're f*****g. this complication he's talking about is much subtler and darker than he seems to believe. i eat a burrito filled with cabbage and shrimp in what two brochures for a San Francisco tourist trap called Peir 39 called "an eaterie." it's the best burrito i've ever had.
* * *
Alfred and I may be looking intensely at each other. we are in a moment of aloneness. and beyond my appreciation of his wonderful meals i'd expressed twice with increasing enthusiasm to his decreasing indifference.
the goodbye is almost an afterthought of mine: i'm looking for someone else, i think liz. "goodbye" i'm about to turn to leave, "wait, let me wash my face." in the memory he says face, though it could have been hands. but he does, wash. i walk around the counter into the kitchen, "sorry i wasn't more of a help last night."
"what?"
"it's just, my hand got tired." in the royal blue dress i wore to the wedding, i picked and chopped several bundles of parsley until my left hand ached from holding handfulls in a fist. "just cut up the stems, too" he'd said, but i didn't listen, so it took forever.
"you were great" he said "the meatballs would not have been the same"
then there's small talk about our respective locations. and "well, i hope we...see each other again, sometime."
"i may go to New York for christmas."
"oh. good! me too. i'll see you there, then."
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