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Description
Driving down East Washington towards the Capital is like driving between the edges of a smooth wooden frame into the photograph I don’t admit I keep in the back of my closet.
They’re laughing, in the photo, falling into each other with the dome rising behind them like the moon.  He’s just finished telling her how much he hates it here, and she’s just poked him in the ribs for the lie.  Right after the shutter closes, he will thank the man borrowing their camera, pull her hand out of her pocket, and they’ll walk home together.  The next morning, she’ll leave town.  She won’t anticipate coming back.
But this is four years after that photo was taken.  It’s riding at the bottom of a box full of old hats and newspapers.  The box is in my trunk, with the last of the junk from my old apartment.  Guided by the Capital, followed by the photograph, I turn into the tiny driveway on Russell and turn off my car.
“I’ll bring everything in tomorrow,” I say to no one, to the streetlights.  But guiltily, almost superstitiously, I rummage through the trunk for that box and carry it with me.
I thought, initially, that I’d be able to leave it behind.  I thought, moving again, I could rid myself of unnecessary memories by accidentally on purpose throwing it away.  Except that every time I got it out of the box they looked so happy that I couldn’t bear to get rid of them.  So I stored them in the bottom of the box in the back of my closet and tried to forget they were there.
And now I’m here, and they are with me.
When I first came to Madison it crossed my mind that I might try to find them.  They aren’t together anymore.  Last I heard he’d gotten a temporary job bartending at the Blue Velvet.  She, I hear, feels a little lost lately.  She finally went back to school, and enjoys her classes, but she’s never liked staying in one place for long.  Her graduation is less than a year away.  I wonder, often, whether she’ll invite him.  Whether they still think about each other.
Well, mostly I wonder whether he still thinks about her.
I’ve never gone to find them.  I’ve actually avoided the Blue Velvet because I might run into him.  This is just the kind of bizarre, female behavior he would be confused by.  “Just talk to him,” he’d say if he was giving me advice, but of course he can’t, because I won’t.  I ignore his voice in my head like I try to ignore hers.
She’s been talking to me since I moved here, pointing out places they would go, whispering about things they liked to eat.  “Look,” she says on the terrace, “we were here.  We watched the boats bobbing with their lights on and stuck our fingers in the water and talked about nothing at great length.”  On Saturday mornings, on the Capital square: “Go over there.  He would have liked that.  Do you remember we spent that morning out here, listening to the bagpipes?  When he found out I was Scottish, not Japanese at all.”
And I say back to her, “yes, I remember, leave me alone, I don’t need help remembering, I need help forgetting,” but she’s stubborn, like all memories, and won’t let me be.
There is a treacherous little part of me that enjoys remembering.  A smell will come along that reminds me of how it was between them, and that part of me makes my eyes water and my heart beat faster, as though something inconceivably good is coming.  I try to beat it down, but the longer I’m in this town, the stronger it gets.  There are pieces of them everywhere.
They are at every newspaper stand, looking at the comics or the Straight Dope.  Everywhere I like to eat I see them whispering together at a table just around the corner.  I hear them laughing sometimes, on Library Mall, and I look around, my breath caught in my throat.  I go to the Arboretum in the fall and take a picture of the leaves.  When the film comes back, they’re in it, sitting at the edge of a pond, reading to each other.  They’re ghosts, and less than ghosts, and more than that, too.
The day after they show up in my photo shoot, she wakes me up.  “Hey,” she says, “I was happy then.  Stop ignoring me, that’s not the way to make me leave.”
“How do I make you leave?” I say.
“Go there,” she says, firmly, and she keeps saying it, a low-level gray-noise to everything else I do.
I know where there is.  I’ve been avoiding it with more determination than the Blue Velvet.  That whole side of town has been lurking at me like the proverbial pink elephant: conspicuous for it’s absence.  After two days of her muttering in my skull, though, I give it up.
It’s raining.  Not a nice rain, but a rain that spits.  I can feel my hair tangling the minute I get outside.  I think about driving there, but I can’t imagine this trip in a climate-controlled vehicle.  This is a time to walk.
It’s a long walk, from Russell to Monroe.  My hands are freezing in my pockets, and I think of the photograph, the first one, the laughter.  For once, she is quiet, although I can feel her lurking in the back of my mind, coming along for the ride.  Or maybe it’s me who’s along for the ride.  I’m having trouble telling us apart these days.
Forty-five minutes of rain later, I’m standing in front of the house.
“Damn you,” I say to her, not quite under my breath.  She’s silent, smug.
The house hasn’t changed.  They’ve added a new coat of paint, but it’s already fading, as though the building is determined to be as ugly as possible.  There are bicycles rusting out front.  If I squint, the rain running into my eyes, one of them could be hers.  This is where they lived.  Where we lived.  The wind changes and I catch the smell of the place.  It might be stale beer and old wooden floors, but it means home to me, somehow.
And now the rain is running out of my eyes again, hot and salty.  I wonder what would happen if I went inside.  The door was never locked when we lived here.  It doesn’t look locked now.  I don’t move.  There is nothing for me here anymore.  I left this house four years ago.
“Damn you,” I say again, “give me me back,” but she’s still quiet, and I realize that she has, in a way, done exactly that.
I sniff, and rub at my face with a wet sleeve.
The door opens.  My heart gives a great leap, but it’s no one I know.  He gives me a strange look, and I turn quickly and start walking home again.  When I get there, I take a hot shower and go to bed.  I do not dream.
After that, I don’t see her anymore.  I don’t see me, as I was.  I look at the photo in the frame, and I can say to myself, “yes, that was me.”  He is still all over the place.  He glances at me in the coffee shop, and I think to myself, “he’s dyed his hair.”  I fall asleep with the feel of his skin under my fingers, and I wake in unfamiliar surroundings, unreasonably lonely.
All this means that I’m not surprised when I see him on State Street downstairs from where Café Assisi used to be.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hello,” I say wearily.
He smiles quizzically at my tone, and it dawns on me very slowly that he is not a hallucination.
“How have you been?” he says, while I grab the post of the stop sign to keep myself from falling.
“Fine,” I say.  I’m staring at him, I can feel it, and my eyes are filling up, although I’m trying hard to think about something very un-sad, like toothbrushes or were-wolves.
“I heard you were in town,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, “studying.  Again.  Finally.”
His eyes are not brown.  I remember them brown.
“School,” he says.  “Graduating soon?”
“Yeah,” I say again.
They are gray and blue.  How can he have gray and blue eyes?
“Hey, what are you doing right now,” he says, smiling, easy.
I smile back, carefully.  I’m fairly sure my smile doesn’t shake.  “Nothing.  You want to get coffee or something?”  I cannot believe I’ve just said this.
“Yeah,” he says.  I can’t believe he’s just agreed.
So we go up to Michaelangelo’s.  He orders coffee, black, and I get tea.  I wrap my hands around my mug and he smiles again, like he has memories that haunt him, too.
We talk until it closes, and when we come out, the streets are damp and the moon is rising behind the Capital.  We exchange phone numbers, and I have a brief, dizzying image of a smooth wooden frame around us, around this moment.  Then it’s gone, and I walk home humming.
“I hate it here,” I say to the moon, and I laugh, and close the door.

Description
Driving down East Washington towards the Capital is like driving between the edges of a smooth wooden frame into the photograph I don’t admit I keep in the back of my closet.
They’re laughing, in the photo, falling into each other with the dome rising behind them like the moon.  He’s just finished telling her how much he hates it here, and she’s just poked him in the ribs for the lie.  Right after the shutter closes, he will thank the man borrowing their camera, pull her hand out of her pocket, and they’ll walk home together.  The next morning, she’ll leave town.  She won’t anticipate coming back.
But this is four years after that photo was taken.  It’s riding at the bottom of a box full of old hats and newspapers.  The box is in my trunk, with the last of the junk from my old apartment.  Guided by the Capital, followed by the photograph, I turn into the tiny driveway on Russell and turn off my car.
“I’ll bring everything in tomorrow,” I say to no one, to the streetlights.  But guiltily, almost superstitiously, I rummage through the trunk for that box and carry it with me.
I thought, initially, that I’d be able to leave it behind.  I thought, moving again, I could rid myself of unnecessary memories by accidentally on purpose throwing it away.  Except that every time I got it out of the box they looked so happy that I couldn’t bear to get rid of them.  So I stored them in the bottom of the box in the back of my closet and tried to forget they were there.
And now I’m here, and they are with me.
When I first came to Madison it crossed my mind that I might try to find them.  They aren’t together anymore.  Last I heard he’d gotten a temporary job bartending at the Blue Velvet.  She, I hear, feels a little lost lately.  She finally went back to school, and enjoys her classes, but she’s never liked staying in one place for long.  Her graduation is less than a year away.  I wonder, often, whether she’ll invite him.  Whether they still think about each other.
Well, mostly I wonder whether he still thinks about her.
I’ve never gone to find them.  I’ve actually avoided the Blue Velvet because I might run into him.  This is just the kind of bizarre, female behavior he would be confused by.  “Just talk to him,” he’d say if he was giving me advice, but of course he can’t, because I won’t.  I ignore his voice in my head like I try to ignore hers.
She’s been talking to me since I moved here, pointing out places they would go, whispering about things they liked to eat.  “Look,” she says on the terrace, “we were here.  We watched the boats bobbing with their lights on and stuck our fingers in the water and talked about nothing at great length.”  On Saturday mornings, on the Capital square: “Go over there.  He would have liked that.  Do you remember we spent that morning out here, listening to the bagpipes?  When he found out I was Scottish, not Japanese at all.”
And I say back to her, “yes, I remember, leave me alone, I don’t need help remembering, I need help forgetting,” but she’s stubborn, like all memories, and won’t let me be.
There is a treacherous little part of me that enjoys remembering.  A smell will come along that reminds me of how it was between them, and that part of me makes my eyes water and my heart beat faster, as though something inconceivably good is coming.  I try to beat it down, but the longer I’m in this town, the stronger it gets.  There are pieces of them everywhere.
They are at every newspaper stand, looking at the comics or the Straight Dope.  Everywhere I like to eat I see them whispering together at a table just around the corner.  I hear them laughing sometimes, on Library Mall, and I look around, my breath caught in my throat.  I go to the Arboretum in the fall and take a picture of the leaves.  When the film comes back, they’re in it, sitting at the edge of a pond, reading to each other.  They’re ghosts, and less than ghosts, and more than that, too.
The day after they show up in my photo shoot, she wakes me up.  “Hey,” she says, “I was happy then.  Stop ignoring me, that’s not the way to make me leave.”
“How do I make you leave?” I say.
“Go there,” she says, firmly, and she keeps saying it, a low-level gray-noise to everything else I do.
I know where there is.  I’ve been avoiding it with more determination than the Blue Velvet.  That whole side of town has been lurking at me like the proverbial pink elephant: conspicuous for it’s absence.  After two days of her muttering in my skull, though, I give it up.
It’s raining.  Not a nice rain, but a rain that spits.  I can feel my hair tangling the minute I get outside.  I think about driving there, but I can’t imagine this trip in a climate-controlled vehicle.  This is a time to walk.
It’s a long walk, from Russell to Monroe.  My hands are freezing in my pockets, and I think of the photograph, the first one, the laughter.  For once, she is quiet, although I can feel her lurking in the back of my mind, coming along for the ride.  Or maybe it’s me who’s along for the ride.  I’m having trouble telling us apart these days.
Forty-five minutes of rain later, I’m standing in front of the house.
“Damn you,” I say to her, not quite under my breath.  She’s silent, smug.
The house hasn’t changed.  They’ve added a new coat of paint, but it’s already fading, as though the building is determined to be as ugly as possible.  There are bicycles rusting out front.  If I squint, the rain running into my eyes, one of them could be hers.  This is where they lived.  Where we lived.  The wind changes and I catch the smell of the place.  It might be stale beer and old wooden floors, but it means home to me, somehow.
And now the rain is running out of my eyes again, hot and salty.  I wonder what would happen if I went inside.  The door was never locked when we lived here.  It doesn’t look locked now.  I don’t move.  There is nothing for me here anymore.  I left this house four years ago.
“Damn you,” I say again, “give me me back,” but she’s still quiet, and I realize that she has, in a way, done exactly that.
I sniff, and rub at my face with a wet sleeve.
The door opens.  My heart gives a great leap, but it’s no one I know.  He gives me a strange look, and I turn quickly and start walking home again.  When I get there, I take a hot shower and go to bed.  I do not dream.
After that, I don’t see her anymore.  I don’t see me, as I was.  I look at the photo in the frame, and I can say to myself, “yes, that was me.”  He is still all over the place.  He glances at me in the coffee shop, and I think to myself, “he’s dyed his hair.”  I fall asleep with the feel of his skin under my fingers, and I wake in unfamiliar surroundings, unreasonably lonely.
All this means that I’m not surprised when I see him on State Street downstairs from where Café Assisi used to be.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hello,” I say wearily.
He smiles quizzically at my tone, and it dawns on me very slowly that he is not a hallucination.
“How have you been?” he says, while I grab the post of the stop sign to keep myself from falling.
“Fine,” I say.  I’m staring at him, I can feel it, and my eyes are filling up, although I’m trying hard to think about something very un-sad, like toothbrushes or were-wolves.
“I heard you were in town,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, “studying.  Again.  Finally.”
His eyes are not brown.  I remember them brown.
“School,” he says.  “Graduating soon?”
“Yeah,” I say again.
They are gray and blue.  How can he have gray and blue eyes?
“Hey, what are you doing right now,” he says, smiling, easy.
I smile back, carefully.  I’m fairly sure my smile doesn’t shake.  “Nothing.  You want to get coffee or something?”  I cannot believe I’ve just said this.
“Yeah,” he says.  I can’t believe he’s just agreed.
So we go up to Michaelangelo’s.  He orders coffee, black, and I get tea.  I wrap my hands around my mug and he smiles again, like he has memories that haunt him, too.
We talk until it closes, and when we come out, the streets are damp and the moon is rising behind the Capital.  We exchange phone numbers, and I have a brief, dizzying image of a smooth wooden frame around us, around this moment.  Then it’s gone, and I walk home humming.
“I hate it here,” I say to the moon, and I laugh, and close the door.