comedy and drama

Sometimes, one missing person makes the whole world feel depopulated.

I place my cell phone against me so that if he does call, I can be closer to him.

"Where does all the Goddam time go?" I asked like there was somewhere it got lost to. The Florida timeshare we had when I was a kid. My high school drama teacher's office. Some cardboard box with "Old Jeans + Lipstick You Lost" scribbled on it.

You wonder about creation until you realize you're created.
...

I admired him when I was a girl, almost a woman. He was older, sophisticated, talented. On my seventeenth birthday I ate dinner with my father, bored, lonely, and I pictured us slow-dancing. We were movie-lovers and in my mind, we remained so as time passed.

"You were the type of man I wanted to marry," I told him last night as a consolation.

"You were just so young, before."

This felt different, before.

"Those thoughts never crossed my mind then," he told me.

 I was confused because he knew I had nothing to give him. I'd sold my love to the missing man. He bought it off me so quick, I had no idea the bargain I gave him.

"This makes me feel sad to be a grown-up," I said to him. Maybe all these walls were never really there, nor the ceiling, nor the chair.

"The girl I first met, you're not the same person anymore," he told me. "You are an adult now. Things are more complicated."

I nodded. There were now two layers of deception between us. He didn't recognize how desperately I wanted things to remain untouched and until that moment, I didn't know how much I'd changed.

"I was Snow White but I drifted," I joked. I felt like crying and I couldn't explain why.

I wanted to have dinner with my father.