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I’ve been…slowing down this week. Everything from the tornado in Kansas to Estes Park feels like a blur. It’s getting dark earlier and earlier now and I don’t much care for driving in the dark when I’m the only one on the road, so I’ve been taking longer to get from place to place…
I’m planning on going to Vegas for my birthday because…well, why the fuck not, right? And I think there’s a part of me that thinks if I just really drag out the process of getting there, I’ll delay my birthday somehow.
My last birthday…we were in a good period, actually. Or, at least, an okay period. Things were…peaceful. The falls in general were always pretty peaceful. We still had the optimism of people who’d spent the summer in the sunshine, and we’d finish up our harvest, start stocking up for winter…there was ritual in it.
Harry baked me a cake. A carrot cake, because we always had a ton of carrots, but she didn’t bother with frosting because, according to her, “carrot cake with anything other than cream cheese frosting is an abomination” and, well, obviously fresh cream cheese isn’t exactly easy to come by. But despite that, it was nice. It was…it was delicious, actually, she’s always been a very talented baker.
So we had dinner and cake and a bottle of wine that she’d stowed away early on—that was a surprise. Both that she’d had the foresight to stash it and that she brought it out for my birthday. When I asked her about it, she said…
Well, actually, she didn’t say anything. I’ve spent a lot of time playing that night over and over in my head, playing lots of nights over and over in my head, imagining how the conversations could have gone, that sometimes I forget what really happened. And what really happened that night is that I asked her why she was wasting a special bottle of wine on me and she just said “well, it’s not all for you”, and topped off both our glasses and that’s not really an answer to the question at all, is it? I wish she’d said—
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We didn’t do presents, obviously. Not for birthdays or Christmas or anything. But we’d usually spend holidays playing some kind of game—chess or one of the few boardgames we had or whatever card game we could best remember. And that night, she suggested we play Clue, which was my favorite game and she never liked playing it much, so that…that felt like a weird sort of gift.
And for that whole night, it felt almost like the old days. Like we were in Richie’s Alphabet City loft, like we were standing on the edge of something; of finally getting along, of finally understanding each other.
Turns out we weren’t. Instead, that was just one of the last good days.
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