Passing the Pink House in Winter

With Unmitigated Joy 

What I loved about you then was your profile –

how you were always looking out into some

middle distance. When I would speak to you it

was difficult to know if you were even listening.

It was the side of your face I knew and your

half-amused, half-transported smile. It was

beautiful to see, and impossible to fathom.

It was a lot – a lot more than I was used to – but it

wasn’t enough. We met after the fall and you left at

the end of the winter.

Much later, reading your journal, I discovered how,

when we walked every evening to the gas station to

buy cigarettes and beer, you were thinking about

that sign in front of the pink house, advertising

fortune telling. You said you imagined her customers

to be a menagerie of people like us, “lost souls,

worried about the future.” You said people are like

sailors looking for patterns in a clear night’s sky,

“irradiated by a billion, glittering galaxies.”

I remember one cold afternoon as we passed the

pink house, you noticed a squirrel had made its way

down from a nearby tree, across the snowy yard and

up and onto the sign. It was sitting there looking

back and forth, as if it were worried. You asked me

what I thought it was doing. I said it was doing what

squirrels always do. You asked what that was. I said

I didn’t know. “I guess it’s looking for food.”

In your journal you wrote, “It was then that I

realized the squirrel was somehow the Chosen One.

It had perched on the sign not because it was a sign,

but because it was hungry.” You said that the squirrel

“didn’t need signs, for what it had was hunger.”

You said, “Everything more than that is a burden.

Hunger is enough.”

If I knew then what I know now, I could have told

you that I had that hunger, but it was not enough.