Word Count: 388
There’s a man who lives in the corner of my eye though I can’t see him clearly. He’s more like the blur of a tear.
I think I know who he is; a man I loved some years ago, when we were young and lived on the top floor of a skinny brownstone in Boston’s outskirts where the smell of the streets was Wednesday’s spaghetti sauce and drunks wrote their names in the snow.
We used to go to the local coffee shop and share a French donut for breakfast because we couldn’t afford more than one. It was a Sunday morning splurge and a time we could argue without drawing our swords. We’d talk about the benefits of socialism and how it could work in a society where the people were educated as finely as we were. Where it wasn’t a sheep herd of takers but a coalition of intellectuals who understood how the system worked best.
Of course it couldn’t but we didn’t accept that for we had the world all figured out. It was easy to find the quirks in our own political machinery. It was easy to blame the powers they wielded for the drunks who lived on the streets they kept watered, for the woman with a different black eye every week, for the Godzilla that crushed the old buildings and the metal monsters that came and built steel and glass teepees that shook in the breeze off the bay. It was easy to blame the powers for our own discontent with each other so we didn’t have to look too deep and see our own flakes of rust.
So we parted without guilt, as friends sworn to love each other forever. As intelligent adults who understood our destinies were elsewhere. But it was never as good, never as ripe as the ruby red tang of a pomegranate, never as achingly imperfect and bold.
He moved with the sun to the cliffs of California. I wrote to him once; he wrote back. He called that first Christmas and the words came like dashes staggering out. And that was the last time we talked.
I don’t know why he’s here now, in the edgeline of vision, as if he couldn’t find his way through the door. Or why I don’t let him back in.
