THE MOMENT
Word Count: 295
The morning rises gray and threatening. The buildings I thought so tall and stately form a scaffold that holds the tarp of sky. Otherwise I think it would fall and smother us, grind our faces into the earth. Overnight it became a solid substance, its blue transparency a lie.
The street is lonely empty on a Sunday dawn. People sleep in late, hiding from the needs that drag them into it on weekdays. I want to roll back to yesterday, before I heard that Darryl died. I turn around and walk backward for a while, hoping that the night will come back with its welcome ability to hide things within its dark velvet folds.
I think back to just before the phone call. How everything was at that point of time. How I never thought about it changing and how fast it did. I was making dinner, shredding lettuce into a salad, waiting for the chicken broccoli to microwave itself to edibility. It had just started to bubble. I could hear it.
Janis’ “hi” was low and soft, crawling reluctantly through the airwaves. Three words later it was out. Amazing. After the initial shock we were talking about his dying as if it were a normal thing. The resilience of the human brain to make necessary adjustments is a bitch. It shouldn’t work that way. It shouldn’t be chipped to delete. I shouldn’t have been able to say “goodbye.” I should have been able to say “goodbye.” How could I have gotten undressed and into bed and fallen asleep?
That morning was just the first of many mornings that gradually turned bluer. The sky pinned back in place by clouds. And I noticed that the buildings were never again tall enough to hold it up.
