shared air

A love affair is not a short story. A story hinges upon a single moment that encapsulates the conflict — a continental divide on the other side of which the water flows off to a different ocean.

Singling out that afternoon on the river, the tube chute in particular, was an artificial construct, a way for me to understand our potential future. Increasingly, that moment when we approached the tube chute, and what happened after, became the instance that proved we could outwit timing and distance, as if doing so was as simple as finding a passageway to whisk us around our obstacles and deposit us, aligned, in the wondrously slow current.

That’s how these things work in fiction. Out of the water that spring day, limping up the steps to where we would wait for a bus, I told her about landing on those rocks, and she confessed to the same fate. Later, at home, when we compared our bruises, we found we were chafed in the very same place: the so-called sit bones, so sensitive to sitting around while waiting to come or go.