In the side mirror the thin wisp of smoke curls, wanders under the orange parking lot light, curls back inside towards the dash as if lost, the long cigarette held by a pale hand as if not your own — a hand that is only a hand, leaning against an open window beyond the “Do Not Enter” sign that reads backwards next to the ticket booth. Norfolk, Virginia, an airport like all others, except no one is there arriving and departing, or waiting.
That’s tiring activity, just like driving, but not so much listening to the same song you came upon again today which you once found on a morning bus to Alcala de Henares. It sounds like another song about unrequited love, and you are on vacation but it doesn’t seem like one really. It seems like you are eighteen and it’s summer, one of those nights you stay up because you feel something comes out of you, but the world goes on.
The cars circle. The arrivers must have arrived. You couldn’t say you felt too much because that has never been your mistake when the time came to feel. The movie of your life goes on; you continue trying to remember not the present script but the previous ones. You think it’s more important to know the past, but the most monumental lines you’ve forgotten even ever existed.
mabel lee 