abandoned romance

The airport is a very uncomfortable place. Everyone is rushing, even in their seats, they are thinking fast, talking fast. My two worried hands are holding onto one another, so tightly that my knuckles are growing white and the beds of my nails turning a dark pink. My back is facing the walls of windows and my eyes are resting on a couple of dark suited bodies, some women, some men, they look like business clones. They are all going somewhere, maybe for the night, or just for the afternoon. I don’t know their stories and they don’t know mine. To my right, near gate C34, there is a young couple swooning over each other, whispering, getting caught up, snagged. I am guessing at their story. I can only remember slivers of what such young love is, I haven’t felt it in so many years. I am just watching them from across this huge room, they are so very far from me.

I met Henry in a quiet library in the summer of 1978. We were both there escaping the sun, the dry Texas heat, the routine. I was trying to find a book about dreams and their interpretations. I wanted to understand the world so much when I was twenty two. It was cosmic to me then, vast and deep. I had on a white linen dress and I was letting a cold breeze from the floor vent crawl up and breathe on my sticky legs, making the light fabric parachute outwards. He had a great head of strawberry blonde hair, and I could see it bobbing up and between slivers of books. In the Science Fiction section our eyes spoke quickly and our mouths spoke even quicker. “I’m chasing dreams,” he told me that first hour, and so was I. After that day I rarely ever went to the library alone again.

Two months and many shared words later we were driving in his sea foam green convertible, my cheek resting against his broad shoulder, his voice humming over the sound of empty wind, into the cavities of my ears. The clouds over our heads looked like cotton candy, sticky to the touch. Desert stretched for miles before us and behind us. On the pavement oil spills made rainbows under the sun. We were going no where and everywhere. Tired of the habitual, we wanted adventure, we wanted to see big things and feel big things, together. So, we drove until empty, filled until full, and drove until empty again. A Bob Dylan song about wanting was playing on the radio, and we could hear it through the static, and Andy was singing. He was so grateful for me and for my time and I felt so necessary, so real, so everything at once. “Hey MaggieJones,” he’d say, “You’re my only one.” We were very much in love that day, those days, from Austin to Southern California and back. I figured that we would never be apart, that he would call me his forever. I keep Henry tucked away in pockets these days.

Time happened to me and Henry. I started wanting more from him and he started wanting less of me, and when I wanted less, he wanted more. Our clocks were different, I guess. And now I’m watching these two twenty-somethings fall into each other and I’m feeling anxious for them, for me. I have always had a very nervous stomach.

These days, the smell of an old library makes me feel very lonely. And sometimes when I’m listening to Bob Dylan, in the static I feel like I’m really just listening to Henry.