I guess out of the blue, you won’t cross my mind.

Another dress – you’ve all seen this one a million times. A marled blue cotton jersey with gray polkadots, short puffed sleeves and a low scoopneck. When it falls apart – and it’s already begun to do so, ripping around the seams under the bust – I will fall apart too. But it’s seen too much and given me its all, so when it chooses to die, I will just have to breathe slowly and accept that it’s gone.

This dress saw the entire country. I fell in love in this dress. Atop a cliff at Big Sur, a hippie took our photo just ten minutes after I realized I was in love with you, and probably always would be. I look scared in the picture, stock-still and startled to the core. You’re holding me but my body bows out from yours at the hips, like I knew not to get too close.

I look like, Holy God, this is fuck-it-all real.

Later, we made love in a field behind a barn. 

–

I said goodbye to my best friends in this dress too, the lot of us crammed around a dinner table comprised of card tables and tablecloths, with you by my side but not really there at all. When the photos of that night came ‘round, I see that you were slumped in your chair, looking like a tired old rag, trying to make sense of how this happened. How you ended up at my going away dinner without the courage to turn off the stove, kick everyone out, and help me unpack my suitcases.

–

I just got a chunky raise, a promotion, and a bonus in this dress. I’ve been at my job for forty-five days. I’m guessing this has little to do with the dress and more to do with the fact that I’ve managed to find a niche for myself in this little company. My boss sends me hilariously snide little emails, just to me, about the people he can’t stand. Several times a day, he motions me into his office and says, Close the door.

This is when life gets good, when your boss says to close the door and it is so he can confide in you, not chastise you. 

When in the middle of an afternoon, you receive a text message from your boss and it says only one word:
Cock.

And you know precisely who he’s talking about and why. 

–

I have  a date in this dress. His name is Paul and he works in finance and everything about him is tidy and smart. Paul’s hair is trim, cut short and simple. His suit is sewn into slim gabardine columns for arms and legs. His nose is thin, his mouth is small, and both are shaped the way noses and mouths should be. They look drawn in by an amateur and wholly uninspired artist, someone who learns to draw from a book and  believes a nose is two straight lines; a mouth, three curved ones. 

Do not be confused – I like these things about Paul. Because for what he lacks in his beautifully bland face, he makes up with mind-boggling behaviour.

See, Paul is a dick. A real dick.

I know he’s a dick when we first meet. And when I agree to a date. And then he’s a dick when we meet up for drinks. He’s a dick when he hands me my wine, and later, when we walk to another bar. He’s a dick for the first three hours of our date. He’s a dick partially because he’s just quit smoking and is on the gum, but also, he’s just sort of a dick. He blames it on being from Yorkshire. I blame it on just generally being a dick.

By now, it’s become a challenge – I am going to un-dick Paul.

I decide that catching him off-guard is my best tactic, so I ask him if he believes in ghosts. He laughs in my face. I ask him if he believes in aliens. He scoffs again. I asks him if he believes in fate or in coincidence.

Suddenly, Paul softens and he tells me about how, ten years ago, he was travelling in Australia and he met a guy in a hostel. It turned out that he and the guy were both once in love with the same girl back in England. They became friends for the night, and the next day, they slid into their backpacks, said their goodbyes, and Paul went north while the other guy went south.

Months later, back in England, Paul ran into the girl that they were both once in love with. He asked her about the guy he’d met in Australia. Her face went white and she told him that the guy had died. Drowned, actually. In Australia.  In fact, he drowned that very night after he and Paul parted ways.

Paul tells me this story at a pub near Piccadilly Circus, and when he’s done, the candle on our table mysteriously extinguishes itself. 

He looks up at me and says, Shit, I haven’t thought about that in a long time. You asked the right question.

And that’s how I un-dicked Paul. 

–

Here is an example of a day without you:

I wake at ten and make an egg and a whole-grain seeded muffin with butter and jelly, and some coffee that Molly brought me from New York. I put cinnamon in it, just like they do at Florent. I open the window and sit at the table. 

Clean the kitchen, sweep the floors, wipe the lipstick note from the mirror and replace it with a new one: Call Dad.

Shower and then do some arm exercises with weights before running to the Tesco for paper towels. And look, strawberries are two for one. Exactly what I need. I go to the wine shop and get a bottle of rioja for the party later. Back at home, I make a  big tub of strawberry and rhubarb compote to eat with thick yogurt and runny honey. I never knew that the only reason people add raspberries and strawberries to rhubarb compote is because without the pink and red fruits, rhubarb compote looks, at best, like vomit. Now I know, hence the need for strawberries.

A pasta salad with feta and fresh dill and some tomatoes left over after a dinner date last week. I chop vegetables and sing along to Carly Simon. 

Walk over to their little mews house and we have a barbeque. We all eat sausages and chicken and bruschetta and the sun comes and goes, popping out from behind clouds just long enough to warm my skin and make the wine go straight to my head. The trains pass every twenty minutes or so and sometimes we yell above their noise, but sometimes we just wait. My surrogate London family are about to start a family of their own – T___ is just days from giving birth, and this makes me happy for them but sad for me. 

A man arrives from having played polo all morning. He has chosen to wear white jeans to play polo, a bold choice if you ask me, and the inner thighs are rubbed filthy, as is the outside left leg. No one else seems to notice. 

One woman, a garden designer, climbs up on the railing that looks over the train tracks. I see her reaching out toward a tree that grows there, fingering the leaves, holding them softly and petting them like they are bunnies or kittens. She says something about the tree, but she says it in Italian. However, I know it’s about the tree because she is gesturing wildly toward the branches and leaves. Her Tretorn sneakers dig into the brick ledge of the balcony as she picks a wild blueberry from the pot by the railing and inspects it.

You don’t speak Italian, do you, the polo player asks me.

No, I say. But I’m pretty sure I know what’s going on. 

Oh good, he says. So you know that she just said, I am sick of living in this world. Goodbye!

We eat ice cream with fresh fruit while a little boy walks around with an iPod cord and uses it like a stethescope on everyone. He holds one end to his ear and places the other end on our hearts or wrists before announcing, Bene!

And to some, a solemn and quiet, Bene.

He holds it to T___’s pregnant belly and proclaims, Bene bebe. 

I get a sunburn and freckled but I don’t care.

Two arms pull me into the garage; two lips kiss mine. All this, in secret. 

I call my father and he cries about a poem I wrote for him five years ago; I cry because he cries. I do believe that he reads it every day. It’s framed on his wall – it’s a long fucking poem, so long that it had to be framed in two parts. 

He tells me that everyone who read it cries. 

One lady couldn’t even finish it, he says.

Perhaps I’ve already written whatever it was I’m meant to write. If five years ago, I was able to write something that moves the stodgiest old people to tears, have I already peaked?

That is enough for today. It’s all so ripe and full without you. I’m not, but life is.