three moments
1:
My friend from the other side of the world comes to visit. I tell him I’ll go with him to the airport before his flight home. When I meet him in the morning it feels like we have so much to say and no time, so all the words left unsaid hang in the air while we talk about nothing. I didn’t sleep well last night, he says. Me neither, I say. There’s something quite intimate about two people agreeing that they didn’t sleep well the night before.
We hug at the gate and I say bye in a voice that’s way too bright and walk off with a spring in my step that shouldn’t have been there. I don’t look back even though he’s still in the line for security. But I am crying and I don’t know why.
I ask my friend whether it means I love him. Why else would I be so devastated, I say. I knew you were going to say that, she says. You don’t love him, you’re just at an emotional point in general. Maybe she’s right because a week later the dull pangs of misery have dissipated. But I can’t help but wonder whether a part of me does love him, whether there’s something between us that I haven’t been seeing.
2:
I go to a party with a group of people that I’m vaguely connected through a friend. Other than her, I don’t know anyone well and I am drunk out of necessity more than anything else, because I need it to loosen up. One of her friends who I’ve heard a lot about but never spoken to is drunk, so I agree to walk him home with her because I don’t want to be left by myself. My consciousness comes and goes starkly and abruptly like blurred flashes of a camera in a dark room. My friend’s friend refers to me by my name and I am surprised that he knows me. When we start walking, him between my friend and I, he laces his fingers with mine briefly. His arm moves from being draped over my shoulder, to wrapped around my waist, to linked around my arm. I feel the firm steady hold of both his hands around my waist as I stumble against a wall but I am too drunk to have any thoughts.
The next few days, I can’t stop thinking about how I’ve never met someone so different from me, and how I probably will never meet someone else like him at this point in his life.
Somehow, his existence feels like something fleeting in my life, something that I have to claw to.
A few weeks later, after I’ve stopped caring, I dream that he’s holding my hand and guiding me through a grocery store. With our fingers intertwined I feel complete, as if his love for someone else has been wiped clean by my amnesia.
3:
In the dining hall, I tell a guy who I had just met about my metal allergy. You’re the least metal person I’ve ever met, he says, it makes sense that you’re allergic to metal. Two weeks later he waves at me in the study hall. I go sit with him and he tells me about the split brain theory. A few days later he asks me if I want to try the ravioli he made. I made it because of you, he says, I saw you eating ravioli and it made me crave it.