Jill Malone

Craig Peterson wades into the koi pond at the Japanese Gardens and fills his pockets with coins. He gets us all thrown out, but has enough change to buy slurpees at the 7-11. I’m thinking this as I follow her over the fence. December, twilight, the garden blue, the fish circling lazily in the pond. She rolls both of us cigarettes, and leans against me to light mine. Memory gets rebuilt by what comes afterward. Every garden and park and trailhead with that girl is marked by want. Wind-chapped cities. If I had been brave. If I had been braver.

The images muddle together like a child’s watercolor, and I can’t speak to the clarity of my own epiphanies. I followed her over the fence into a garden, and I remember blue on the trees. Her face cold and red. A girl receding.

The sentences lengthen now; I can feel myself stretching. Don’t you see? I have wanted to tell you about the moments that allow me to be new. All the cracks, and missteps. How I dragged myself forward on my elbows without any real hardship. These girls on bridges, never crossing. I can’t hold anyone together anymore. That was the vow I made, and I wrote it on paper to avoid forgetting. When I named my desire, I said, “I want to be loved as though nothing is wrong with me.”

I convinced her to meet me for lunch before she met me for dinner because she seemed so nervous — kept vowing to puke. And because I was worried our chemistry wouldn’t hold up in person. We’d only written. Tens of thousands of words over a week and a half, but no actual physical contact. She agreed.

On the drive to the river, she told me not to be nice to her. “If you’re nice, I’ll probably cry.”

“Why would you cry?”

“I’m losing a client and her daughter today, and I’ve tried everything to keep them.”

“Should I be mean? Should I punch you in the face?”

“No, just don’t be nice.”

So I told her a story about G. And when we got to the river, we walked out on the bridge and she told me the history of Peaceful Valley, including several failed suicide attempts. “This is where they wash up. The last guy just broke his wrist.” She wouldn’t look at me, which gave me plenty of time to look at her.

People jogged past, even a guy in a suit. A twitchy weimaraner. A woman with tiny weights she kept saluting overhead. The water dashed below, and I lasted nearly five minutes before I kissed her.

She wore enormous tiger-striped sunglasses like a buggy Lady Gaga, a black leather coat, and giggled endlessly. Noon on a Monday.

She said we were too much to be an affair, and too little to be girlfriends, so she called me her whatever. I was in love with her. It went on like that for ages. She’d come to town for Violent Femmes, and we’d do our whatever thing. In Ireland, we had sex in a hostel shower. In a cow pasture. In a ruined castle. Almost always segregated in the dark. I helped her move, and drove the truck over two mountain passes. She was the relationship that never really happened. The one that slid in between other things.

She ended up with a lunatic, and I ended up married, and the whatever ended. I dreamed of girls then. Cities of girls. Girls building houses, and digging ditches, and giving speeches. Girls in summer dresses. Girls in Levis. Girls with tool boxes.

I was convinced in the end I’d be with her. Years later. I’m not sure when I realized that it wasn’t going to happen. That sometimes you just aren’t supposed to. Sometimes momentary is all you get.