Somehow, I’ve gotten here again: leaning across a table in a basement bar to hear him, pulling my hair into a ponytail, drinking my beer, letting my hair out, pulling it up. I cannot sit still.
I’m running this spring, which is what I always do at times like these, grateful for the uphill under trees, the return at dusk, the sureness of my feet finding landing, the cars beside me and no one else. My feet are calloused; at the bar, I rub my toe over my ankle and try to remember everything he says.
I suddenly want to talk about elegiac poetry and memorials, and I regret not knowing the names of trees or the title of the Alice Munro story with the rabbit running in the headlights of the car. I’m twenty years old again, astonished with the romance of expression, craving late nights and long mornings, creating the memory of the mouth of another person. And I’m reading The Brothers Karamazov, as I did in Dublin (finishing it in a coffee shop on my way home from work), as I did in Lesotho (reading in a cemetery at the edge of the valley), as I do at about this time of the year.