2003-09-26 - 4:57 p.m.
July 23, 2003
“A slide show and it’s so slow—flashing through my mind…”
One page of my journal begins with an address for one of the nicest couples I will ever meet and goes on to remind me that the tootsie roll was the first wrapped penny candy appearing in stores in 1896. Am I looking for bar trivia? Also on the page you will find that it took five hours to drive the 278 miles from my parents’ house in Grand Junction to the Coopers’ house in Colorado Springs. The page is chock full of food, music, sights, and laughter you would never imagine. Ice-cream, coffee, horse-back riding, and cowboy music to the smell of pond water and Mom’s cooking, to the fright of driving the thousands of feet up a mountain in the night, to love stories, to revisiting the beautiful prairie sea of South Dakota from my porch in New Mexico, then the memory of that drive fades as a deer pokes its face from behind the shrubbery and the sun sets in all the Southwestern colors, and I go to bed pretending I have no electricity. All that and more are found between the lines of that one page.
On another I am compelled to write a love letter, one of those that are never sent, one of those that say absolutely nothing when you want to say everything, but discover there are no words that equal the beating of a heart, so you remember what his sounds like and smile. From inside my room I can hear the neighbor open the freezer door, the click of ice cubes and the sounds of other subtle movements, and I know he is trying to quietly fix himself a drink, another one. In the morning I see the empty bottle in the trashcan. As he continues to talk to me each breakfast and evening I understand that he is drowning himself. He has it all, but has nothing, and there is nothing that I could say that would touch him. I was relieved the day he went back home.
