Like to Get to Know You (Daily Planet email #907)

August ’68. Summer of Love the Sequel, haw haw. …Nuts. In my town, when you graduate with no money and middling grades, you go to the factory. But I’ve seen what the factory did for my Stepfather and Stepfather 2 and uncle and cousins and so no thank you. I’m going on the Kill a Commie for College Plan. It’s not like things are so peaceful here at home. Gonna do just enough to stay alive, I don’t even care who wins. Maybe I will win. Could be nobody wins.

She says I have no plans. Which is true. Who doesn’t want to just hang loose, especially after finally getting out of high school? She’s not hung up about plans, she says, but in my case? It seems I am some kinda king of having none. Man, whatever it is I’m doing, even if it’s nothing, I’ve earned it. In advance.

It’s hit and miss from that point. She doesn’t answer the phone, I won’t talk to her friends. We find ways of being too busy, otherwise engaged and disengaged, dry glances from opposite ends of a party. It’s all just scuffs on the tunnel around my heart. I go to her house once to profess everything, but all it ends up being is I kiss her flat, empty expression on the stoop and then I’m skulking off, like just another shadow. I don’t hear the door slam, but I can’t look back.

I spot her sometime the third week of August, at the Certified. She looks so complete, I can’t even bring myself to say “Hi.” Me, hiding like an idiot behind a stack of cans. She crosses the parking lot, and the last thing I see is the flash of light as the passenger door catches the sun and closes. August, die she must.

…

I do find her one last time at an estate sale, in a college yearbook. Right there in my hands but miles away, a small black and white face on a grid of strangers’ faces, a familiar somebody looking out as a young woman on the edge of her life. But it’s really nothing as heroic as that, she’s twenty-two, who knows what was gonna come of it? I search her unchanging image for a hint of regret or hope, apology or desire. In return, I receive a shimmer of sunlight through the trees, a hint of pine on the air, sofa upholstery, mortar fire, the crumbling fibers of a song. Too much time gone by and nothing to see there, if I could.