Snowflakes and Oranges and Raindrops like Meteors

This is what I worked on all November. And December, up until now. Anyway, I haven't posted a damn thing here in ages, and I thought I should. Apologies for the Leukemia thing. It's a strange coincidence.

Oh, one more thing. It's long. Like, 7000 words long. In case you're short on time.

Like the most romantic of love stories, I met Emily in the spring. She had walked out of the theatre with all the other men and women from the performance of the evening. But I took no particular notice of her, nor anyone in the crowd. I hadn't counted on falling in love. Once I congratulated the few friends I knew in the show, I figured to be on my way.

Friends and performers gathered there, in the parking lot behind the theatre. Many left quickly, after-parties and alcohol calling them to rented duplexes long ago worn down by college attrition. I watched the crowd thin and the people scatter like pigeons from a jogger. Only the people around me lingered on. Some of them friends, but many more were unfamiliar. I strayed from the conversation and let my thoughts carry me away. I thought of spring in the northern states, and about how maybe I'd find a road into Canada where icy snowflakes still cling to fields and burgeoning, pea-green stalks of wildflowers push through the crystallized blanket of snow.

"Hey. We're going." Megan snapped her fingers in my face and brought my wandering thoughts back to the group.

"What? Oh, I thought I might just take off," I said. Sorry." I had been here for nearly a week. I hadn't been home for longer than I could specifically remember.

"Ha! No. Like you have somewhere to be. You're coming." Megan was an old friend. I didn't put up a fight, but, damn, I wanted get out. It'd been good to see friends, but these other people meant nothing to me, thought nothing of me.

Megan ushered me towards her car. Something warm began to grow deep in my chest. It tingled the heart. It could have been anticipation, but for nothing that I could think of. It could have been anxiety. It could have been rye whiskey sipped from my flask.

It was probably the whiskey.

Megan drove us out of town. I think we drove nearly an hour out of the city. She filled the car with words and stories and thoughts and I let my own mind float away. I walked down winding, narrow streets in Belgium -- where I'd been only a month before. Alleys so thin sometimes that I had to turn sideways if someone passed the other way. It was warm there, I remember. The kind of warm that settled on your skin and slowly sank through to the bone. I lay in the afternoon sun and imagined I felt the way a teabag feels when steeped in hot water.
I remember a man I met there, Georges, the painter, and his wife. They'd been married forty-seven years. I spoke a bit of French, and they spoke less English, but we got along fine. Inside their small townhouse, I found only this: paints and canvasses and works stacked and piled and hanging from every space leaving only jagged gaps over windows. Hanging from the ceiling were various spices and bare herbs drying on wires. Hidden between the tubes of oil paint and stacks of ivory canvas were wines, or breads, or cheeses wrapped in wax-paper. And floating in the spaces in between, in the halls, in the air, I was rejuvenated with their venerable love. I would breath deeply and it filled my lungs and lifted my thoughts. I was jealous for all they had. I would have stayed forever. My editor called me home. I can't sell books overseas.

"OK. We're here. This is Gabe's house."

Megan's voice. In Belgium? No, she wasn't there. She was in the driver's seat, talking to me. She had been talking about Gabe earlier. She said she didn't like him in that way, but she sounded jaded when she talked about his girlfriend.

Jealousy, but I didn't say anything.

I got out of the car. It was warmer out here, if only by a bit. The air tasted sweet. The promise of spring was tenuous, but, briefly, a smile found my face.

We arrived just after Gabe. He and another man were half-dragging, half-lifting a keg through the front door. It looked like we were the first ones there. I said to Megan, "It looks like we're a little early."

"Yeah. I told Gabe we'd be around to help out if he needed it."

Okay Megan. Whatever you say.

We walked inside. Ahead of me was the kitchen and the stairs to the basement where the keg was headed. To my left was the living room. I walked straight to the couch and sat down. I sipped from my flask. No sense waiting for the party. I could hear shuffling and thumping and expletives as the boys put the keg on ice. I think Megan was down there, too. I was the only one on the main level. I could've been past the twin cities by now. I sighed quietly. Minutes passed. I don't know how many. I stood up and slipped my shoes off and went downstairs.

A few more people were here than I had previously guessed. There were seven in the basement. They were setting up a beer pong table when I reached the basement floor. Six bare bulbs lit the room. There was no real ceiling, just plywood beams with criss-crossing wires and skeletal PVC pipes passing between. Shag carpeting covered the floor. There were too many couches and they were scattered about the basement at odd angles.

This was college. Fascinating.

For an hour or two, people arrived in earnest. I passed the time like a pinball, bouncing from group to group.
The alcohol kept better company still.

I eventually settled down on a couch with a guy I'd met once or twice before. He made small talk. I told him about strip clubs in Osaka. I don't speak a lick of Japanese. It was winter when I visited. It was cold enough to freeze the marrow in my bones. Emily joined us. She knew the other guy and they looked at each other and he excused himself to refill his cup and I didn't see him again.

"You look bored," she said.

I nodded. "Little bit."

"I'm Emily." She reached out with her hand and I shook it.

"Nice to meet you," I said.

"Yes it is."

There is no such thing as love at first sight, and if there was, we'd all mate for life. Thoughts and feelings are just too complicated. It's a special and beautiful burden on humanity.

Emily was close to making me rethink my conviction.

She wore skinny-jeans and a tangerine spaghetti-strap top under a white blouse. Her eyes were big and blue like campaign buttons. I turned slightly to face her. She was a student, but what did I do?
I told her about dropping out of school and traveling. I guess you can call me a writer.

Emily thought that was grand.

I told her it isn't as great as it sounds.

We talked easily, for a length of time I don't remember. When our conversation lulled, we stood up, together and wordlessly, and went outside. We sat down on the front step. Emily leaned into me and I slid my arm around her waist. We talked lightly, enjoying the first warm night in months. Here and there, between sentences, we kissed. Her lips were bittersweet and tasted like oranges. We went back inside. Emily had to leave. I lost the rest of the night in a flood of alcohol.

I awoke in a daze. The sun filled the window over the couch where I found myself in the morning.

My head hurt.

I sat up to pull the curtains closed, and I was blinded by glistening, white world beyond the window. So much for spring. A seamless cloak of snow concealed everything I could see. The pale blue sky is all that revealed the horizon. Houses popped up and dotted the landscape like candles on a cake. I lay down again and checked the time. It was only 8:30. No one stirred in the house. I wasn't even sure anyone else was here. I stared at the ceiling for a few minutes thinking about what to do. I didn't want to wake Megan, but I was ready to leave.
Breakfast. I needed food first. I got up and headed to the kitchen. I sifted through the freezer and found some frozen waffles. I put a few on a plate and stuck them in the microwave. I leaned against the counter waiting for the waffles to cook. Next to me was a pile of mail.

I can call a taxi. That'll get me back to Megan's where I left my car.

The microwave beeped. I grabbed my breakfast and searched the kitchen for a phone book. I found it above the fridge. I called a cab company and gave them the address printed on a bill from the heating company. I ate the waffles and waited for the cab.

***

Home was a three hour drive north if I used the interstate. Or I could make for South Dakota through county roads and blue-highways if I turned west.

I merged onto the northbound freeway. I justified going home because I knew I had uncollected mail that at this point is surely just being dropped in mounds on the front porch since the mailbox would have been filled weeks ago. I probably have bills to pay. I still wasn't sure exactly when I was home last. I'll have to ask the neighbors.

I pulled into my driveway shortly after midday. The snow had ignored convention and thinned as i traveled north until it had disappeared completely a few miles outside of town. I found my front porch oddly free of mail.

Had I asked someone to collect my mail?

Inside I found my mail stacked on the dining room table covering most of its surface. I saw a corner of my laptop left uncovered and I swept the assorted bills and coupon books off it and flipped it open to check my email. One hundred and twenty-seven unread messages. The third email from the top caught my eye. It was from Emily.

Someone knocked on my door. Damn it. Email will have to wait. I turned to go answer the door and nearly bowled over my neighbor, Mrs. Vandenbroeck. I guess her knock was just her hello. Mrs. Vandenbroeck was my adorable 82-year-old neighbor. She described herself as nearly-dead and tried as hard as she could to perpetuate the stereotype of the nice old lady who lives next door in the townhouse with tulips in the garden and geraniums in the window-boxes and a bird-bath and a sundial in an overgrown yard surrounded with a whitewash picket fence and somehow the sun was brighter and the air was warmer and birds sang prettier songs when you stood in her garden. When I was home my kitchen counter always had a plate of homemade muffins or cookies or brownies or any other dinner-spoiling dessert Mrs. Vandenbroeck would bake. Her husband died eight years ago. I think she missed him. I reminded her of him at my age, she often told me.
"I saw you come home and I thought I should bring you these cookies I made this morning since you haven't been home to eat all my other treats in six weeks or so now." She pushed the plate into me. "Careful dear, it's still a bit hot." Well, it was warm, but I don't think my hands were in danger of burning. Orange macadamia nut.
Easily my favorite.

"Has it really been six weeks?" I asked.

"Oh my, yes. Close to it anyway. I hadn't seen you in two or three weeks I figured I'd better start getting your mail, too, I hope you don't mind. And I didn't know where you put it normally so I just piled it here on the table and I hope that's ok-"

"Mrs. Vandenbroeck, you're rambling."

"Gosh, yes. I'm sorry, I just haven't had many people to talk to recently and since Susan moved to Florida there just aren't as many good people around here like there used to be."

"No, I guess not." I just let her keep on talking. She did bring me cookies. Big cookies. The plate only had eight or nine and I'm pretty sure the recipe says it makes two-dozen. I liked having Mrs. Vandenbroeck around. She was good company and told stories about growing up in the 30s and 40s -- when people still gave a damn, she said. But today there was an email from Emily waiting to be read and I just wanted her to leave.
She left eventually. About an hour later. I went back to my computer and clicked on the email. It read, "Hi," and skipped a few lines before: "Sincerely, Emily." It was simple and short and plain, but I read it and reread it a hundred times and found a thousand words hiding in the spaces in between.

I typed a reply. Dear Emily, Hello to you, too.

Sent.

I closed the laptop and went to the kitchen. My fridge, pantry, cupboards -- all devoid of food. The cookies on the table were the only food in the house. I grabbed my keys and a cookie and headed to the store. I stepped out the front door and saw the ambulance in Mrs. Vandenbroeck's driveway. Even though the EMTs were rushing the get the elderly woman into the back of the ambulance, I saw the scene as a tableau. Two men and one woman in blue jumpsuits with EMT written on the back in large, white letters. One man is holding the rear doors of the ambulance open. The other man and woman are posed, as if running, with the stretcher halfway down the front walk. The ambulance is backed onto the lawn, one of it's back tires in the garden crushing white and orange and yellow and red tulips.

And it was gone. The only evidence that anything was wrong was the indents in the lawn and the mangled garden. Her front door was half open.

***

Sometime while I had been shopping heavy clouds had moved in and let loose their sodden cargo. It rained steadily all the way home and through the afternoon and into the evening and when someone knocked on the door around nine that night, and I could not see it but I could hear the fat, slow-falling drops hit the ground with thicks and thlucks.

Standing on my porch was a woman in her late 40s or 50s. She didn't shift or uncross her arms when she spoke and her lips only moved in thin vibrations with her words. "I don't think we've ever met," she said after a moment. "I'm Helen's daughter."

"Helen?"

"Vandenbroeck."

"Oh, right. Of course."

"Anyways, she suffered a stroke." I didn't say anything. "She's been in a coma for a few hours now."

"Oh. Well, thanks. For telling me."

I shut the door and went to bed. It rained all night. Sometimes stronger, beating on the windows and falling off the eaves in sheets and it would wake me; sometimes weaker, faint kisses of rain, like walking though a heavy fog, but always, always raining.

I arose mid-morning. It was nearly as dark as the night before. The imposing clouds blocked most of the sunlight and the streetlights burned amber without enough light to shut them off. They illuminated the mistiness swelling above the blacktop and the whole block glowed orange as if lit by a fire beneath the streets.
I sorted bills and penny-mailers and LL Bean catalogs over coffee. Sometime later in the morning there was another knock at the door. It was Mrs. Vandenbroeck's daughter. She was standing in the same place and pose as the night before. I actually wasn't sure she had ever left. She looked at me with tired eyes. Color was markedly absent from her face besides bubblegum circles under her eyes.

The daughter said, "She's...passed." Her voice was distant, faint, like she was at the other end of an empty hallway and I was hearing the echo. "She wanted you to know."

"She wanted me to know?"

"Yes."

"She wanted me to know that she's dead." I repeated it. Unsure of how to take it or what to say.

"Yes," she squeaked.

I looked over my shoulder and back into the house as though something was going on and needed my attention. "I have to go," I told the daughter. I shut the door without saying goodbye.
I sat back down at the kitchen table and sorted mail and opened bills and drank coffee and re-sorted mail and sorted bills and finished another pot of coffee and checked and re-checked credit card statements and at eleven o'clock I went to bed.

***

I left Emily's apartment in the evening of the third day since I'd arrived. Wispy, high-altitude clouds drew spiderwebs across the sky. The sun was still too high to start changing colors and looked like a fuzzy, yellow cotton ball stuck in the web.

I had intended on staying here only one night. Emily had sent another email a few days ago and said that if I ever found myself back in town, I should let her know. Maybe we could get together. I told her that I would, that I could, coincidently, be in town in just a couple of days as I had some of Megan's things from her parents to deliver.

Whether or not I actually had a box of assorted things for Megan was not important.

I called Emily as soon as I passed the city limit sign on the highway.

The following days were furious in love and emotion. We exploited our transcendent affinity and transformed it into words as best we could. When we failed at that, we transformed it once again. On the second night we fell asleep to a violent thunderstorm that rattled windows and pulled trees until they whined. Our love had turned the gods to jealousy.

I decided to leave that morning. I woke up early. Emily didn't stir. I felt anxiety and nerves knotted in my chest. It was like someone had a grabbed a bundle of nerves in a clenched fist and was trying to pull it through my sternum. I wanted to run. I stayed on the edge of the bed, sitting, breathing rhythmically.

Emily woke up.

I told her I have to go.

She smiled like she understood. If you must.

***

I had my first short story published when I was seventeen. My second at eighteen, just before I graduated high-school. After two semesters at the University of Minnesota I dropped out, although I waited until I knew my novel would be published.

Prodigies don't go to college, I told my mother.

I didn't want to be in school anyway. There were thousands of places around the world that I wished to see and I saw no reason that pretentious institution that served no purpose besides taking parents' money to justify their children's existence should hold me back.

Am I cynical or just bitter?

Sent.

I was in Seattle and it was raining.

How stereotypical of you, Seattle.

I watched the wet world pass by through the window of the restaurant where I'd stopped for coffee and lunch. Nameless citizens walked back and forth on the sidewalk in drab raincoats under colorless umbrellas. The whole city was awash in grays and blacks.

I had wandered onto the set of a black and white movie.

As soon as I saw the Seattle skyline claw it's way over the horizon, it had started raining. The vibrant landscape was quickly drained of color. In the city I found a mom-and-pop sandwich shoppe that was everything the shining corporate coffee and restaurant chains of Seattle weren't. Complete with red and white checkered tablecloths and plain white dish-ware and pudgy waitresses that called you darlin'. I ordered a grilled cheese. It came buried under fries and grease, which I don't remember ordering, specifically. I washed it down with an orange soda.

Emily replied to my email within minutes like she'd been watching for my correspondence. She wondered if I had any regrets.

I don't think that I do. I wouldn't do it differently if I could. But sometimes I wonder where I am.
I closed the laptop and paid the check and I walked back to the car, soaked to the bone ten times over by icy rain.

How I ended up in Seattle, I don't really know. It offered less than I could offer it. But now I was on my way out, so I didn't dwell on my own weird idiosyncrasies. These big cities wear me out quickly. The ambivalence that humans are capable of is only perpetuated by the shoulder to shoulder living. It's impossible to think or feel when no one thinks or feels for you.

With no specific destination in mind, I drove north through British Columbia and at some point I figured to turn back east. Coincidentally that's where the highway took me. Through Whistler and around the northern side of a national park to Pemberton, I drove. Rarely did I pass another vehicle, only every few dozen miles. Onward, between mountains still buried in snow and fields trying to revive themselves after winter.
Lillooet, Cache Creek. I just kept driving. Nothing called for me to get off the road. Somewhere in there I found a campsite and slept for a few hours, then I was on the road again. As I approached Kamloops, traffic increased remarkably, seemingly all at once. What had been open road was now crowded highway, transformed in only a mile or three. I didn't want to explore the city again and I followed the first exit I saw off the freeway and into a town that I never got the name of but looked pleasant enough and had giant, fiberglass coffee beans outside so I had to stop.

The coffee-girl had no interest in small talk. Disappointing. I took a seat in an upholstered chair near the window, although there was not much activity to note outside other than the breaking clouds giving way to springtime sun. I flipped open the laptop.

Hello! I'm sad you left. oh well. i wish i could travel with you, but, alas, i have a degree to earn. They say that separation is good for a relationship. I dunno, i'm starting to have doubts about it because i dont think that whoever said that accounted for things like love no matter how young or incomplete. anyways I'm in a hurry so this is short.

emily

When I left her apartment she told me she loved me and I said it right back without thinking about it and hadn't thought about it until now, nor had I thought much of Emily. Perhaps separation is good for now I missed her awfully and for reasons I wasn't sure. I'd been gone only three days. Or maybe it was two. Well, no matter, because the point is I suddenly longed to be with her again and maybe that's how they define love. Perhaps the farther apart two of you are, the stronger you're pulled towards each other again and as my whole body tightened and my heart rate increased I was suddenly very hungry.
I went back to the counter and picked the biggest scone I could find in the case. I didn't respond to Emily's email. I finished my scone and didn't count on this town offering much of anything so I took my leave.
I continued eastward. I drove through more cities than I care to list and, truthfully, don't remember the names of more than two or three of them anyway. I spent nights in little roadside inns that, in Canada, offer none of the slices of Americana that you come to expect when traveling through the west in the United States. I didn't bother to stop in many towns unless I needed gas or food, but none of those town seemed ready to offer any answers so there wasn't a point, either. Somewhere in those days I had sent Emily an email. It was simple, short. I'm sorry I had to leave you, too. I'll be back. Once I find something to bring back with me. She didn't respond with her usual alacrity.

More time passed. I drove in circles. Or maybe back and forth on the highway. I don't know. Eventually I found myself in Winnipeg and I was walking down one of the streets and up another because I couldn't find my car and it might have been because I drank that fifth of whiskey last night with the men from the Winnipeg Gun Club but I felt like I hadn't slept in ten days so when the old man on the park bench called out to me that I looked lost I nearly fell over.

"No. No I know where I'm going," I told him.

"I didn't say you didn't know where you were going, I said you looked lost." It was either too early or too late for witticisms.

"I'm just going home." Oh, please just let me go.

"Not a bad idea. You don't look so good, eh?"

"I'm fine."

"Of course you are. You kids just keep on going. Night after night after night. You go ahead and go, but I'll tell you something. I know you ain't from here. You got that look of someone who don't belong. And I said you look lost 'cause it looks like you lost your heart. And you ain't gonna find it halfway 'round the world. They don't say home is where the heart is for nothing, eh?"

"Ok, thanks. Guy." I stumbled off.

Strange man in the park. I felt his eyes follow me down the road. Taxi. I fell into the backseat. There's a hotel close, right? Go there.

When I woke up I was in a hotel room quite a few stories above the street. My laptop was open, next to me, on the bed. I rubbed the grit out of my eyes and I saw an email from Emily displayed.

I'm sorry I haven't sent you anything this week, I've been busy wrapping up this semester. You haven't mentioned coming home, I know, but maybe you should. I just found out I'll be at camp all summer. I'm going to be a counselor at this wonderful camp in Ohio. You should visit before I leave.

The message was dated five days ago. I guess I hadn't checked my email in a while. There was another message from her in my inbox. It came in two days ago.

I guess you're not coming home. That's unfortunate. Why haven't I heard from you? I'm leaving in a couple hours. I'll try to call you or email you when I get the chance.

I love you.

Well, I'm nothing if not timely. I spent the week in the hotel room. I bought a bag of weed behind the hotel. I smoked it in the park. I learned nothing about myself.

I drove home from Winnipeg. I stopped outside of Fargo and slept for an hour or two. When I got home there was a package on my doorstep. Wrapped in brown paper and squarely tied off with twine it was either a bomb or a present. So I stared at it for awhile and ultimately decided to bring it inside figuring I hadn't made any enemies and had nothing to lose anyway. I cut the strings and tore off the brown-bag wrapping paper and sliced the packaging tape on the box and underneath all the packing peanuts was a gift from Emily: three leather-bound books containing the works of Poe. She had marked Annabelle Lee. She said it was her current favorite.

Three months went by; a summer lost. It rained a lot. When it didn't rain it was hot. The kind of hot that cooks you and squeezes you. The kind of hot that makes breathing arduous. Puddles that lingered were turned to steam and I think most of August was lost in a fog. I worked listlessly on a few ideas I had shelved for novels as I tried dismally to distract myself from her. But I failed at that, too. And it wasn't until August when summer began to wind down and fingers of cold autumn air started scratching at the dawn that I figured everything out. I didn't need the love and admiration of those around me. In fact, I didn't want it, wasn't looking for it. What I never had was someone to love and when I found someone to give it to, I was complete. When it was gone, or far away, or somewhere besides where I was looking, I was crazy and I was miserable. Home wasn't where my heart was, it was where Emily's heart was and even though she was hundreds of miles away, her heart was here, in the box with the books and for the first time I could say that I had finally come home.

It's amazing to spend your whole life running and searching for something unknown and to think it lies thousands of miles away around the globe, so I flew here and there and everywhere only to arrive at the destination I thought most improbable but turns out was exactly right, and here I am. Comfortable with myself once again.

***

Early September. I think it was Tuesday, or Wednesday morning depending on how you count the days. I rolled around in puddles of sweat all night and slept for only a few hours. I crawled out of bed not long after the sun was fully up. It was 78 degrees.

I walked into the kitchen and opened a bag of dark coffee and scooped out four scoops of grinds which is one more than I needed and I poured water in the back of the coffee maker and placed a mug on the counter so I could be ready when the coffee was done. On the other side of my street, prisoners from the county jail were dropped off for work release cleaning the trash from the creek bank. The orange jumpsuits of the convicts bobbed in and out of view as they poked at litter in the scrub.

I stepped out of the shower and dried off and patted down my hair. I pulled on shorts and a white t-shirt and went back to the kitchen and poured a mug of powerful coffee. I opened my laptop and a new document to write something, anything.

Nothing. I stared at a blank screen for two hours. A knocking at the door. My first visitor in months.

It was Emily.

Or, what I knew was Emily. She looked different, if I can be so bland. A faded, bleach-stained orange t-shirt and threadbare jeans hung loosely from her shoulders and hips. She looked thinner, or gaunt, or however you want to describe. Why should I bother coming up with new adjectives about the already-thin-girl-who-lost-weight-over-the-summer when I knew exactly why she was here and I just didn't want to say it?

She looked sickly. Her skin was pale and faded and, despite the golden, morning light, had a grayish quality.
I didn't say anything as I looked her over and neither did she and when eventually spoke is in a stage-whisper. She hadn't the energy, or maybe the desire, for more.

"I didn't go to camp," she said. "I'm sick. I was in the hospital. I have cancer."

Nothing. I said nothing. I was a man of words standing in the doorway of a house that was built by my propensity for linguistic entertainment! And I had no words for the woman I loved telling me she could see death with her wilting eyes. She stood on the porch, wavering, deteriorating.

"Um, that's...what?"

"I'm sorry. I couldn't tell you. Not then. I wasn't ready." Emily hugged herself as she talked.

"You should come in." I stepped aside and ushered her through. I held her elbow and lead her to the kitchen table. I poured coffee for the both of us.

The temperature and humidity climbed. Emily didn't look the least bit bothered. She looked dry and comfortable and somewhere in her listless eyes I caught flickers of dread and maybe there was a fearful shell hiding Emily from everything around her.

I felt like I was swimming. Sweat beaded on my forehead and temples. Emily's was fixated on the center of the table as if there was something there, but she couldn't focus on it.

"Cancer," said I.

She didn't say anything. The air got heavier, harder to breathe. It's too damn hot. Emily remained oblivious, discrete.

Thoughts rushed in and out of head, fleeting as quickly as they arrived and all the things I should have said never made it to the synapses for my mouth to actually speak. But the viscid air clogged my throat, so I don't think anything was coming out anyway.

"Leukemia," Emily admitted. "Acute T-cell Leukemia Lymphoma." Details, details, details.

Now my mind was blank. When it was suddenly real, where before it was just a theory, I had nothing to say. A pitiful "I'm sorry" escaped with a breath.

Finally she looked at me. She placed her hand lightly on my cheek. "It's okay. I'll come out alright." She smiled, and for a second her face lit up. I saw a glimpse of the Emily I met. The vivacious Emily.

She got up to leave.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Back. To the hospital, I guess. I still have treatment."

"Right, yeah. Of course you do." I looked down, at my coffee. I thought if we were coffee, I was the beans and she was the filter. I added, "You can't stay."

She put her hand on my shoulder. It felt cool through my shirt. "No. I can't. Sorry."

Emily kissed my forehead and left the house. I jumped up to chase after her, but I was too slow. She was already in her car and leaving the driveway. I don't know what I would've said had I caught her anyway.

***

It was November when I saw Emily again. She called me, told me I should visit. There was a strain in her voice, an urgency, a longing. I could be there in just a couple hours.

It was a windy afternoon. I drove through tornadoes of caution-tape yellow and tangerine leaves as I headed for the highway. The sun that streamed through the windows of my home and warmed my mood and the sky was slowly covered by thin clouds as I drove south until it was an edgeless white sheet overhead.

Emily was in the hospital. I don't know if she'd been there all these months or was recently admitted or somewhere in between. I hadn't asked because I really didn't care and probably didn't want to know. All that mattered was the present and presently I was pulling into the parking lot to a monstrous hospital that dominated the beleaguered sky. The only parking spot I found was next to a custom painted micro-bus of a scene with a fiery sunset where beatniks smoked dope in silhouette.

Inside the hospital at the information booth I got Emily's room number, since I guess that's where they keep that sort of info. She was on the third floor and the hallways were filled with people pulling IV racks or clipboards or boxes of tongue depressors so I skipped the elevators and took the stairs where breathing room was more easily obtainable.

Emily's room was easy enough to find. It was at the end of a hallway and a bit farther away from its neighbor than the other rooms. It was a corner room with an extra window, which would have been nice but this particular corner room looked out and across the roof of another wing of the hospital and into a parking structure. If you stepped back from the window so whole the scene filled the glass, everything was gray and beige and looked like a pretentious modern art installation and I didn't find it particularly inspiring towards life and living.

Emily lie in the bed and she smiled at me. I smiled at her.

She was quiet.

Pale.

Distressed.

Emaciated.

Except for the machine that measures your heart beat, Emily was free of the tubes and patches and electrodes that I expected. She was bald. She was beautiful. A bouquet of yellow and red chrysanthemums wilted on the bedside table.

"It's nice to see you," she said.

I smiled. "Yeah. You too."

"I didn't think you'd come."

"Of course. I said I would."

"Yeah, but I wasn't sure you could." The smile faded from my face.

Silence, again. But this time nothing really needed to be said. A minute or ten passed. "You're bald," I said.
Emily laughed. I hadn't heard her laugh in half a year. "I've been bald for a while. I had a wig on when I went to your house a couple months ago."

We wandered through a conversation of our earlier lives, talking about this time and that kid from when we were children or teenagers and how we meet different people but nothing really changes and this time and that kid happened again when we were twenty-somethings. Only the circumstances were different.

I was there some time less than two hours. Emily started to drift off, drugs or weakness pulling her down to sleep. The soapy whites of her eyes disappeared and reappeared behind heavy eyelids. Most people get to leave the hospital when they feel better. I had rock in my stomach and my head was swimming as I crossed the parking lot to find my car.

I drove back home. To the home I once knew. I'd say out of habit, but my habit is more about avoiding home, it seems. I guess to say "I drove home" would be to say "I drove in the most opposite direction of my residence that I could determine." So what I meant to say was, "I drove to the house that I own the mortgage on" and that's where I found myself a few hours later and I'd figured out what home meant and it didn't mean that anymore so now, at the kitchen table, I had no frivolous nuances of my life to contemplate and I had no choice but to think about Emily again. Her semester would be over in a few weeks, she was supposed to graduate. In January I was taking her across an ocean -- which one, I wasn't sure. Europe or Russia or India or Australia or Africa. We would find someplace new and get so far lost we wouldn't know black from white and that's when we'd find the locals that would teach us how life was to be lived.

And now it didn't matter. Emily didn't tell me she was dying; I could see it just the same. But when I left her room, an attendant put a hand on my shoulder and I nearly punched him because I didn't want to admit that death was watching from the far end of the hall.