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.