He pulls it down to reveal who he is, as if I would not know the hair, the forehead, the eyes, oh the eyes, the shoulders, the hands, the person. Calm down, my heart, be still.
It strikes me that Covid is but a distant memory now although it took too much away from us, and his mask was like a depiction of what we’ve been through, what he’d been through, since he lost both his parents to it. Some of us could put Covid and the Lockdown behind us as an unpleasant memory because it was just a strange time we survived, but for him it would always signify his loss and grief. And through him, for me as well.
I imagine he wears the mask as a symbol of defiance, an acknowledgement, a commemoration, a memory. To remember every time he picks it up.
I allow my pleasure to shine through my bearing. We exchange pleasantries, and there is something I spot in his eyes, curiosity perhaps, interest perhaps, a return of feeling perhaps, and although I remain calm and in control, my heart dives to new depths. His interest can only mean he had completely and totally put me behind him, and now, seeing me again, he’s curious.
Because, my seeming lack of interest means quite the opposite.
Every moment of the last two decades I’ve lived with him, I’ve conversed with him, I’ve taken him everywhere, I’ve been his, through college and post-graduation and marriage and job and divorce and job loss and all the other suffering life subjected me to.
What a shipwreck pretending to be a success. To be at peace. To be something in the eyes of the public. Because otherwise they would smother me with sympathy or advices or disdain.
And here he was, asking me about my life, and wanting to catch up. “It’s been a long time.”
It’s not, I want to say. It was just yesterday. The memories are so fresh, although the pain feels like a million years.
Catching up is just what I want though not how I want it.
Life gives me what I want, I’ve noticed, but decades delayed, and in the tiniest possible drippy doses, or slightly contorted. And not one ounce of happiness along with. I would be too dejected to even feel grateful. Like I said, who runs this scam?
A lifetime of distress means you forget what elation is, and how you’re supposed to react. You hold yourself in check at all times, because of a bizarre fear that if you so much as relax, something bad would descend on you.
Never forget—never forget, it is after you!
He is on his way somewhere, so we decide to meet later, at the Café. Twenty years ago, it was a different place, smaller, that sold coffee and cutlets, one of the few haunts for young people. Coffee Point or something it was called. I have rejected the name so many times in my mind, slammed my door on it, that it refuses to enter when I try to recall it.
