Milagro - vignette

On her last night in Ellensburg we went to the pub that locals call the Hodge-Podge. Bridge leagues liked to congregate there for late-night games amidst raucous laughter and drunken serenades—even now I still remember the cards slapping, coins jangling, beers downed to the very last dredges before one of the waiters came by with another round of fresh pints so full they sloshed over the brims—the place, the sounds, the memories. And afterward: us, stumbling along the main road belting off-tune variations of Sweet Caroline, letting our floaty feet carry us wherever they so wished, later finding ourselves lying on our backs in the deserted tow yard where Ellensburg ended and wilderness began.

The wind was picking up, a howling, violent gust of sand and gravel, unlike the day we had gone biking. We lay in the darkness so black we couldn’t see a foot in front of us.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she said, and of course by that she meant: now we must address what we had been sidestepping this entire day, from breakfast at the gas station to long rambling walks along the city trail to drinks at the Hodge-Podge, I’m leaving tomorrow. How unreal. It had been squeezed into the backmost corner of my mind, like a stain on the wall behind an old cabinet, there and not. Hiding only helps you forget for so long. I spat sand from my mouth and turned to face her, or at least the vague direction of her.

“Today.”

“Today,” she agreed. Her breath quivered on my cheek like a low-flying moth’s wings on warm nights when I often lay in bed with the window meshes pried half-open. So she was looking at me too.

There was a long pause. I said nothing; there was nothing to say. What she wanted was not here, and what I wanted was something not even I knew of. What could I have said to fill the gap? I had no intention of burdening her with something stiff and unmeaning like I’ll miss you, because it wasn’t her I’d miss but myself. I thought of us as the Sun and the Earth, preordained to collide and fuse by either the will of science, the will of God, or both. Perpetual revolution and then perpetual being. Who would it be, the one that’d perish to become part of the other? Who was the Sun, and who was the Earth? Perhaps I already knew.