We meet at the food co-op where I worked once a week in the old East Village, measuring out grams of rabe and kasha wheat for old women in wool scarves and heavy fur caps. He tells me his place is hosting a Christmas get-together, a dinner party across the river at an artist’s loft.
I tell him excitedly that I’ve been there before, it’s a comical misunderstanding but he says well why don’t you come by, and he gives me his copy of The Steam Room and asks me to tell him what I think. And I think, I could love him, I could be good to him. Take life as it’s offered you.
I meet everyone that night for some reason, we can’t stop telling people we just met. As if sharing a revelation, those moments that wink at the mind of God. For once everyone has more than enough to eat.
“I’m so happy you’re here,” his roommate says with something so warm and unfamiliar in her eyes. Somehow there’s no contradiction, so eager she is to welcome me into the simplicity she keeps. I learn that she is a concert violinist. She tells me she is happy to have found something to which to dedicate herself fully. She gives me a jacket with a silver-blue pin in the shape of a gleaming fish.
She tells me I’ve lived so many lives, that she thought I was describing years when I told her about the last three months, all that movement, all those changes.
Before I go to bed he plays Freight Train for me on the guitar, his voice cracks in all the same places as it does on that old scratchy recording, beautifully. It’s snowing when I wake and step out onto the roof, I notice the sky is impossibly blue.
I never saw him again. Sometimes I really don’t like what memory shows about me, it makes me wince and wince.
Tania Jaramillo’s work has appeared in Hobart Pulp, Dreck Lit, and Dodo Eraser.