The Tavern

I am 7 minutes late for our first date. You are sitting at the bar with your back towards the door, a startlingly white, starched collared shirt--like much of your wardrobe, noticeably too large for you--accentuating the breadth of your shoulders, your back, your ribs, even as it swallows you whole. I wonder what it is you have in there, to need a cage that expansive around it. I figure that's what I've come here to find out.

The fading summer sun is melting the windows set within the stone walls behind me, lighting you up like a goldfish in a bowl. I hadn't noticed the chestnut red undertones in your feather-fine hair before this moment. I hadn't noticed your feather-fine hair before this moment.

You are going to turn around, but you haven't yet.

The time I stand staring at you like this spans a second, maybe two: just long enough for it to register that I am seeing you before you know I am. That I am taking you in without yet being taken in. That whatever is about to happen between us hasn't quite started happening yet.

You are going to turn around, but you haven't yet. And I'm standing here, suspended with the dust motes in the orange air, feeling my life split in two.

I feel the person I've been up until this moment suddenly standing, invisible but present, beside me. She squeezes my hand. Leans in and delivers the tenderest of kisses to my cheek. And without a word, she walks out the door.

You are turning around. A bolt of lightning grounds itself like an army of electric fire ants marching down through every cell in my body into the stone floor below. You must have smelled the ozone.

I feel the queasy ecstasy of the bottom falling out, of time revealing its true nature--and looking nothing whatsoever like the reliable, if ominous, arrow it so likes to pretend to be. I feel the dizzying mystery of the future being responsible for the now.

Just as if I had called your name, you are turning and looking me straight in the eyes--an absurd, startlingly white bandage half-loose and flapping like a flag of surrender across your upper lip.

I don't have the slightest memory what my first words were to you in that, our first moment intentionally spent together, when the new me met the new you for the first time, but I remember they were clever. And I remember your appreciative laugh.

Happy Anniversary, my love. Thank you for changing me.