nights I spent outside, without her, looking at the sky and waiting for
something to happen. A comet, another plane, anything. Anything to
change the world again.
I flipped through page after page of words describing color, sounds,
the way the light looks over the Empire State Building in the morning,
and at least once a page, my name. The last page was a weak rendition of
a love song without the rhyming and without a hero, rising with every
move of her pen and falling flat once the ink hit the paper. I felt obligated
to read the page, word for word. The first line read, I am madly in love
in a way that I never have been before. More madly in love than with
swimming pools in summer, or old books in corner bookstores, or a page
filled with words.
Maybe she was talking about me, or maybe she was talking about a
penny she found on the sidewalk. She fell in love with everything. She
fell out of love just as quickly and just as easily. I flipped to the last page
and saw that she had stopped mid-sentence. She was still looking for an
ending, I guess. I pulled out my old notes from my astronomy class, the
ones about black holes. I tore the page out of my notebook and paper
clipped it behind the pages she had written.
There was supposed to be a solar eclipse that afternoon. I packed a
backpack with my camera and sunglasses, then shouted up the stairs that
I was leaving. I heard light footsteps above me, and I waited impatiently
at the door as she came down the stairs.
“I’m gonna go, I’ll be back later.” I could barely even look at her.
“Okay. Be careful. Don’t look directly into the sun.”
I laughed like she was joking. I think that she kind of was, because she
kind of laughed too. But her laugh reminded me of the summer when I
was convinced that I could be the next man on the moon and she would
laugh at my impressions and mannerisms, and soon the smile left my
eyes and settled in the false curvature of my chapped lips that ached and
throbbed with the pretense that I was putting up to keep her laughing.
Her laughter eventually faded, and the quiet seeped into my skin and
settled into my limbs, aching with every uncomfortable shift I made away
from her.
She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek, turned on her heel, and
moved back up the steps. I stared after her, my cheek still tingling from
139