Human Moments

They stood together at the edge of the pond, their backs to the city.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, running off toward the Italian ice cart. She looked back with a smile, “Cherry?”

“Always,” he said, noticing her hair in the brilliant April sunlight.

He waited, touched the dandelions that had ascended everywhere, picked one for her return.

The cab driver remarked on the snow that had started to fall just as I realized we were stopped on your new block. I looked up at the seemingly infinite windows and wondered, of all the stories they held, which one told yours.

I can’t picture you in this new place — how your furniture fits, where you put your books, your patterns of milling about. In my memories, you still exist inside the familiar blue walls that saw us love wildly, infinitely, insanely — before trust had weaponized you.

I wonder if you will always be the hole in the middle of me that happy things fall into.

“I heard the snow should be gone by tomorrow,” the cab driver said.

“Yeah, I hope so.”

The woman across from me in the hospital waiting room makes endless circles with her thumb and forefinger. The sound of a daytime soap opera fills the room, but doesn’t reach us.

I think she feels alone in the magnitude of her worry, but our bones ache the same. It is not knowing that binds us.