4 a.m. and I’m on the street blinking back tears, half-walking, half-stumbling down the icy street, watching my breath come out in white puffs of smoke. A yellow taxi comes careening around the bend and passes me by.
You say cats have nine lives but that we only get one. I think that that’s probably true but you’re somehow up to your 14th. Not bad for a human, but it helps that I’m particularly good at bringing you back from the dead.
You believe in heaven and hell, you tell me, but I have a secret that nobody knows. Everybody gets second chances, and in our past life, you were Johnny and I was Jane, and we were in high school and we were in love. I didn’t want to go to prom because I hated fancy dresses the same way I hated beetles—with a silly, unfounded fear that shook me through to the core and refused to let up. But I loved Johnny so I put on a long white evening gown that looked too much like a wedding dress, pinned a flower in my hair, and went to the high school gym to wait for him in the dark. Well, he was late and I was mad and I wanted to rip my dress off. By the time Johnny came strolling in, immaculate and heartbreaking in a black and white tuxedo, I was nearing the searing, nonsensical kind of panic that only happens when it comes to the most asinine things.
Will you leave with me? Pick me up in your beat-up truck and just disappear?
I’d rather stay here and drink some beer.
Please? Let’s just run away from here.
In the end, Johnny stayed and Jane walked away because it was what she’d done best her whole life. She felt a gap in her gut that became a gorge that ripped a hole through her insides that never quite got sewn up the right way.
And that was the end of Johnny and Jane.
4 a.m. and I’m on the street blinking back tears. After so much time and so many words flung between us like knives, and so many words left unsaid, frozen somewhere between my brain and the tip of my tongue, it’s sad when the only thing left to say is goodbye.
But maybe we still have time. Maybe you have a magical 15th life that will save us both. Or maybe we can take Johnny and Jane and make them new. What if Johnny scoops Jane up in his beat-up truck? Maybe he takes Jane by the hand and slides her white wedding dress off her until she’s shivering and naked, then wraps her up in his tuxedo jacket to keep her warm. They climb into his beat-up truck and stop to get a cold 6-pack of beer at the local gas station. He carries her across the school’s football field, dark and wet, pulsing with electric stadium lights. He carries her all the way to the very center of the field, which may as well be the center of the earth. He lays her down, and they laugh and they kiss and they look at the murky stars and then the sprinklers come on and they’re soaked to the bone and covered in mud and she’s dancing to him across the dewy grass barefoot with the ferocity of a woman in love and it’s like a Woodstock reverie and they’re so so happy. Maybe.
Or maybe it’s just time to say goodbye.
