I Don’t Remember You On Virginia Avenue
Today I went for a long stroll around our neighborhood. I hadn’t seen the light of day in quite some time, my feet had not pounded the pavement, my blood had been sitting, sloshing, against my veins. I started out toward town, knowing that once I circled back around, I would be confronted by all the ways I could return home. I knew they all contained memories of you, lining the sidewalk like poppies, and I didn’t really want to stop to pick them; nor did I desire to tread indifferently upon their leafy bodies.
I faced one stretch of road in particular that I have not walked down in six months.
The last time I took that side street was with you, the chill of autumn making the trees bend and ache, preparing for snow blankets, you had nearly poisoned yourself with drink. We wondered if a little air might help you to recover. You staggered down the pavement, me at your side, still reeking of ethanol. We hadn’t even made it beyond the first few houses before you began to retch, vomiting into the street without even pausing your steps. From where we paused, you releasing toxins into a patch of now-definitively dead greenery, I averted my eyes. I looked instead to the friendly mountain that rose above us. Its presence a comfort to me, always rising through fog in the early mornings to greet me–especially on those lonely mornings when you did not.
But that time, the mountain, swollen with decaying forest, bore down upon me. I realized its enormity, perhaps for the first time. Or rather, I realized my own helplessness, my own lack of magnitude. You sat down on a dusty curb and it was then I realized that what had roiled inside of you was now like the mountain; bigger than us and we, particularly me, were powerless.
This evening when I walked down that street, the bright light of a spring evening still glistening between the budding trees, I realized how little it reminded me of you. Yes, I recalled the spot where you began to heave alcohol into the grass. Now it’s lush and there are little forget-me-nots popping up wildly, indifferent to your illness. You poisoned yourself, but not the earth. I
walk along this little street, that mountain looming over me still, and I smell the sweetness of a freshly mowed lawn. It doesn’t remind me of you, but of my girlhood days, lying on a soccer field watching my best friend play. The water trickling from a storm drain reminds me not of you, but of playing in ocean puddles as a little girl, grasping starfish with a child’s entitlement. The familiar pop-pop of my hip as I step a little too far outside my gait reminds me not of you, nor of me, spreading my thighs to offer myself you to, no! But of the pleasant pop of extension, my leg in a long, arabesque, dancing in the warm sunlight of a studio in Westchester County.
The smell of wood chips and tires don’t make me think of you, but of my father and the precious times spent at work with him on weekends, drinking warm Coca Cola near the diesel trucks. I find myself pausing at the end of the street.
I have reached the other side, found myself back on the main stretch of road that will take me home.
I think about looking back. I don’t.
