Dear Daria's Diary,
Human beings have been writing poetry for forty centuries, and we've yet to find a single line that makes love hurt less. Really makes you wonder what the point is. And by "you", I mean "me". Why couldn't I have picked an all-consuming obsession that actually does me a lick of good?
I think I got incredibly high last night. And maybe I wasn't the only one: The kitchen is jammed full of the evidence of intoxicated judgment. E.g., leftover calzone and fro-yo from a ... Turkish deli? Ours not to question why. Somehow we made it out into the town, because I distinctly recall a Sikh telling me in a BBC voice that six samosas do not constitute a meal. I think I tried to explain how I would write a movie adaptation of Pale Fire. And somewhere in there, I was grabbing Tom by the arm and insisting that we were the luckiest people in the world because nobody else could say that their mutual girlfriend has a perfectly proportioned cock.
Maybe I can hide in my room for the rest of my life?
... We must have made it out and back again alive, because she was definitely dancing up the courtyard steps at Longfellow Tech, dressed like a femme Clifton Webb from Laura, singing "I Got It From Agnes".
Giulio and Aisha... right, she got trashed with me, and he was designated driver and got them both back to Stoneham.
... Why is Jane passed out in the shower instead of her bed? How can I be craving more calzone for breakfast? Questions for the ages.
She and Tom are snuggling in the loft bed of the guest room. Oh, circles of Hell, I think I told Tom... Yes, I gave him a very clear explanation of the fact that her voice makes me believe that Troy burned.
I think I need to lie back down now.
* * *
This is odd. Jane and Aisha and Giulio must have gotten halfway into changing out some of the art in the gallery. We've some pieces taken down from the walls, and various storage containers dragged out and opened. Indeterminately in the midst of all that, Jane was paused, peering into one of the boxes, looking weird. Like a memory had hit her sideways. I think...
... Yes, found it. Or rather, them — college artifacts. An envelope of photo prints, and two canvases she had done using them as a guide.
She was enrolled ahead of schedule in some upper-level elective. It was winter, no later than the ice end of February. They had some assignment where the first step was going out to take golden-hour photographs, and she drew the short straw on locations — a hill by the shore all the way out in Quincy, and the salt marsh adjacent to it. She was grumbling up a storm. And I recalled that a couple Digamma alumni had shacked up out that way, taking a house near Quincy Center or thereabouts. They were all smiles and let us stay the night before, even lending us their car so we could drive out to Mosswetusset before sunrise. I baked them a loaf of blueberry bread in the Digamma oven to say thanks in advance.
Parked at a trail-head, then the walk up and over the hummock, through the mist and the forest... and then the Sun rose over the water.
Jane nudged me and just whispered, "Worth it."
She had a camera — a film camera, it was. And I had a camcorder that ran on Hi-8 tapes. A flock of birds took off from the salt marsh and launched into the sky, and I turned so fast trying to follow them in the viewfinder that I nearly slipped on a muddy rock. Would have faceplanted into the water if she hadn't caught me by the coat-collar.
The light was rose and gold and then a cold clear blue, and all the while she had contentment upon her. We were out of sync with the city — misaligned just enough from its rhythms to feel so much farther from it than the distance alone warranted.
Even driving the car back didn't shake that feeling. Returning to the house... that sensation, like I knew the place not from life but from a story I had written, which normally takes months or years of separation to induce...
We all made an occasion of it with a big diner breakfast, and Jane and I took our time migrating back north to where the T lines meet.
Yes, and then Jane developed the pictures in the BFAC darkroom, and she called me over to see the results. I baked another loaf of blueberry bread, and I found her trying to explain to Cendrine that she wanted to paint a moment that she had missed with the camera, to interpolate on canvas. "Waterfowl in flight?" Cendrine said. "Isn't that rather, well, correspondence-school?"
"Don't you trust me?" Jane asked.
And... good grief, was that it? Jane and I running off to spend the night together and share the sunrise... Did Cendrine think that Jane was cheating? Or did she know that we were just doing art, and feel that that alone was, given the emotional weight of it, infidelity?
When Cendrine graduated and moved away, did she refuse to wait for Jane because she believed that Jane and I... Did they fight about me? Was that the memory that gave Jane such a nasty turn — an argument full of indignant denials?
I am damn lucky to live in a place with her art on the walls, and I would be delighted if that included waterfowl in flight. Just one morning when the world was not all wrong, seen through her eyes and her skills, her ability to make transient motions that preserve a lasting vision.
I think I hear people starting to struggle into motion.
Forty centuries of love poetry, and not a line sounds right for greeting your best friend, your girlfriend and her boyfriend. What have we even been doing?