Recall and Remembrance

A Penny for Your Thoughts

We reclined.  She said

I miss him and more every time I drink like this and find myself out of character.

I recalled her kisses of a few hours earlier, she said don’t worry you won’t lose me.  In the haze and flashing, heavy beat.  I held her hands and looked into her.  I said I know you’re drunk, but remember always this is how I feel about you.

Kisses hard, selfish, lustful as though punishing herself.  I was taken aback but was lost anyway, drowning deep in their fullness.  In her biting I found a joyful release of years.  I wanted this character, to feel to be the one.  I didn’t want her words and tenderness to only be the product of alcohol.

Reclined in the car we did not talk of it.  We talked of human pliability.  I spelled 'Dostoevsky' for her when I wanted to tell her how wonderful her kisses were, however misplaced she may have felt them.  Whenever I would pause in search of the words, she would smile at me and say a Penny for Your Thoughts.  Even as I listened to the first tear sliding down her cheek.

His car, she said and I knew they still travelled together, knew I was spending this time with both.  I wanted to cry with her, climb with her in this emotional landscape of heart, love, tragedy and history.

I fell deep into the well of her first waves of crying and then her laughter.  Pain, joy, and the bittersweet blur of the lines between them.

In the morning driving and sunshine she said again a Penny for Your Thoughts.  I just smiled and thought sadly of her leaving soon.   When I should have told her how happy it made me when she phoned one night after 11 p.m. just to see how I was doing.  Or how her face lit up childlike when she saw a fish-shaped jug on my kitchen counter.  I mentioned something about Dostoevsky and was charmed as she tried to pronounce his name again.

My day was spent in frustrated search for the ways and means, the words to let her Know.  I never knew what it was I wanted to say, but I kept feeling a need.  I tempered the desire to share my thoughts upon recall of her disappointment at another friend’s departure, when he surprised her with apparent and unwelcome secret love.

Instead I searched for Poet’s words, or other things which would tell her  a story of the liberation she’d given me and of the prisoner I’d now become.  Where every time I spent with her somehow left me wanting to say something more, just as either of us walked away or in the moments afterward.

Man is a pliable animal who becomes accustomed to everything.
         F. Dostoevsky

© 1999 J. Popowich