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.