prompt: shockingly, only an hour had passed/title: objects in mirror in misc. flash fiction

I had no idea how badly it would end but then again, I also had no idea how long it would last. Waking to a CPAP mask ripping off my face, being told her mother would be there with a U-Haul within an hour, had already turned left at Albany en route from the Long Island Sound. There’d be thirteen years between those moments, after all.

I had no idea how many good times there’d be, how many bad times we would comfort each other through, between those seconds. Bankrupt on both coasts, fired by my childhood hero at Christmas, my brother’s first seizure, frothing in front of the Dodgers game on our little futon. Stopping her from grabbing the former first-lady’s ass before the Secret Servicemen pounced. I was crazy. She was crazier. We chased dreams together, made love like we were starved for each other.

I’d met her on my twentieth birthday at a mutual friend’s party. She’d been going to art school and was amazed to meet a straight boy for the first time in months. I hadn’t had a woman interested in me since my long-distance girlfriend from New Jersey had dumped me my first semester of college. “Oh, Mike, you and your city girls,” my friend Kari once told me. She wasn’t wrong. I’ve always been chasing something more urban than urbane, in women and every other was as well. Chasing the thrum of things as restless and relentless as my heart.

I had no idea what the next twenty years of my life, even the next thirteen with her, would be, I was just a kid who’d shared a wild unexpected weekend with that half-mad woman, fevered kisses and nightswimming, who’d parted at the Thruway stop a few miles outside of town and was walking home through farmlands, drunk on all of my future’s vast potentialities.

Maybe this would be a summer fling, maybe we’d have five children. Either way, surely, I’d have a couple of Oscars under my belt by then, I’d be rich and famous in some thrumming urban mecca, having secured my parents’ comfort, having made my folks proud.

I felt like a man, maybe for the first time in my life, maybe for the last time in my life, ambling through that countryside back home. I felt like my father, like my grandfather, I felt connected back through all the men behind me, back before we were men at all, back past Gilgamesh and Adam, to when we were animals in trees, discovering new movement in our thumbs.

The green grass in the moonlight, the raw incessant hymnals of the crickets and the toads, the gleaming of the stars in the night-sky as if the gods themselves put pinpricks in the veil between firmament and heaven just for me. It felt like twenty years between that truck-stop and my childhood home. Shockingly, only an hour had passed.

Last updated July 25, 2019