Driving down a one-way street three blocks from My home,
I stop at a light that’s gone red.
In some allergic flinch to the stillness I look to my left, not meaning to see anything but instead seeing one of the houses that is not Mine. Of course, My house is just one of many on this two-laned and southbound street, but it’s the only one I live in, so in a way it’s the only one, you know, but
looking through their window I am surprised that I’m surprised by a light that flicks on in the kitchen, where by the sink a man and I guess his wife seem sad as he runs plates under water, looking down but speaking to her.
She is standing behind him, and like most people you tend to see they are somewhere between forty-five and sixty-five, still by every right alive and the double surprised feeling came from being slapped by remembering that there are indeed many other houses with people like you who have names and brothers and clothes in the hamper, which is crazy,
because last week in a condo on My street a land lord found an elderly woman who had died in her bath tub, and she was there in the tub for I think nine days and he only found her because she was late on her rent,
but the thing is that my girlfriend recently decided that basically everything is OK and now we X like three times a week, and kinda like when you’re watching screens or walking in grocery stores, it’s hard to imagine death as anything more than a rumor when you’re on your back with your face covered in someone else’s hair.
On drives home when I know Camila is coming over my brain has a tendency to swell, and the thought of what’s to come obviously leaves little room for thinking about what the couple’s conversation is about by the sink, and this time it’s my foot that flinches at the unchanging red light — I lift it off the brake and then back on.
There are no other cars and the light stays red, a harness around my chest, and the fifty-one year old’s, whose age you could say implies that their parents aren’t exactly young, could for-all-I-know be saying something like ‘honey we can’t afford a nursing home, because of Amelia’s college fund, and there’s no way we have enough space for your father to move in with us,’ which is obviously not an enjoyable conversation,
so even though they live in a home with a porch and nice floors and probably had five clandestine years before little Amelia with just work and dinner and intercourse and ‘look babe, we can fly to Oahu on points,’ now by the sink it doesn’t seem to be like that, even though there was a time when they, too, drove home with their swollen brains afloat in peppered lust for what was sure to come. When he turned to face her, the light went green and I put My foot on the gas, headed in the only direction there is when you live on a one way street.
