theme "secret" title "untethered moon" in misc. flash fiction

There are the things in your life you regret then there are the things in your life that you miss and you rue and you feel bad about but you don’t exactly regret them. The things you learned from and wouldn’t take back but know you also grew out of or, anyway, that also out-grew you.

The girl with the rich curly mane of hair like a bottle of ice-cold root beer that could never finish overflowing no matter how long the Lord God let it remain unstopped. The woman with the Irish freckles as if her skin were cappuccino foam flecked with cinnamon sprinkles on top. Or the one with the hazel almond-shaped eyes and the mathematically perfect derriere. Or the one who was six foot tall and yet seemed to somehow also possess seven-foot long legs. Sometimes you find a book on weird conspiracy theories you borrowed from one of them at the back of the drawer. Or maybe a hair-comb unmoored when you finally moved that old cat-scratch-mangled couch.

When your tastes in the opposite sex run toward the unstable genius, you find your life littered with little secrets like that. Ticket stub from an avant-garde art show. A half-full tin of candies all shaped like Pac-Man. Pac-Men? It all comes back to you in scents and in tokens, in little bits of history adrift in the loose change cup next to your keys

You wouldn’t want her back, of course, she left you because her family offered to pay off her student loans if she left you, you the untethered art-bum with the big ideas and the Swiss-cheese resume but still. You wouldn’t go back to her but wouldn’t undo the past either. Before it was bad, it was really good once, so you hold on to the tiny secrets that remind you of the wonders without hanging onto the trauma. She stole the car when she left, for Christ’s sake, but still.

Even the things that you didn’t even consciously pick up then, that were background noise in the day but come into sharp relief now. The mint of the chapstick she wore on her lips. The steam from her favourite tea in some stranger’s hand at the coffee shop. The faint chemical sting of her deodorant brand on someone else’s body, there, in a slow elevator at shift chance. You didn’t notice the label back then but years later now that it’s over, you’ve put together what it was.

Secret. She covered her sweat up in Secret. Store-bought coupon-clipped Secret. From shower to sleep, she demurred her true self in a thin layer of Secret. You never even thought to ask back then though now that it is years dead and over, now you know. That’s what she wore, she always wore Secret.

There are things that you miss but you don’t regret. But you still miss them, in a weak moment, in a grocery store, here and there.