what I think about when I walk up Chestnut

The city’s full of desperate people, throwing their hands up in the air, talking to themselves, quiet mumbling and then a shouting explosion as they look back at a perceived wrong, an imaginary or remembered antagonist.

I think what if one of them had a knife, and as he walked by me he pushed it in my chest to the hilt. What if it didn’t hit my heart, but pushed me back to sit on pavement, leaning against the sandstone of the post office. I would hold my jacket around it, trying to keep my blood -- MY blood, the indignity of someone else laying claim to it -- from spilling. I imagine the assailant would run, the act random, not wanting to finish the job of killing me. Weakened, I'd try to keep the well-meaners (assuming any arrive to help) from removing the blade and hurting me more.

I think about shootings, a crazed kid with a gun in the quad, me hiding behind a metal trash can, trying to shelter myself. The kid coming up to me, leveling the gun at me, maybe he’s one of my students, or a former one. I act calm like I do in the classroom, even though my fingers are locked white on the metal slats of the can, the only reason I’m upright, and I ask the kid to spare me, leave me to document what’s happening, tell his story, make him matter.

he remembers

from a freewrite I did with my students last weekend. The assignment was to write about an emotional thing, like falling in love, crying, loneliness, without cliches. To start with "I remember" or, as one of the students suggested, "he/she remembers"

He remembers sitting in a shower with her, water coming down all around. He had never been with someone that way, just naked together, not ashamed or even aroused. He remembers the rings on her fingers, middle and pointer, the rings bright silver, watching her pull them on and off while she talked. He doesn't remember what they talked about. The water slicked their hair down, they kept blinking and ducking their heads to keep it out of their eyes. It made her hair dark, like his. It made her skin pink. The shower stall was small, level with the bathroom floor, they had their knees up but their toes still almost touched. He remembers what it was like to touch her whenever he wanted, so casual.

The last time he saw her, fully clothed in the passenger seat, he wanted to put his hand on her leg, feel the warmth of her under her jeans, but it wasn't allowed anymore. Their breath fogged the windshield and he cracked his window to clear it. It was early morning, bright sunshine, and his head hurt from fighting all night. He breathed in the cold that hurt his nose and throat. He turned on the car to drive her home.

mentor

I dreamed about Connie for the first time since she died. We were in her garage, I think, or on her porch -- the in-between rooms blurred together into light, so that we could have passed easily from one place to the other. I imagine that she was wearing her jeans with hose and black flats, her big sweater. I think that's what she wore the last time I saw her, but I can't picture it for sure. I wish I could remember exactly, everything about every time I saw her, everything we said. (How tiresome, she would say about that, and she would laugh.)

The garage had big wood beams and dirty cardboard boxes full of clean books, and a sign that said No Hunting near the door to the kitchen. We were standing by the boxes, let's say. (Unless we were in the porch, and then we were next to the picnic table with the sea glass and shells in baskets and bowls, and I could see the weather stick that pointed up or down to indicate whether it would rain or shine.)

I said to her something about how I would have to stop being lazy and just finish the book. And she didn't say anything, nodded, maybe. It was the basic truth, maybe not that it's laziness, but that finishing the book is completely up to me.

And then maybe we worked a little, counted books in boxes or shifted boxes around. And I said,

"I miss you. I just miss you so much." Like I was letting go of some kind of pretense, admitting something simple, that again we both knew. It felt, in the dream, that I had just moved away, that she wasn't really gone. That I had chosen this.

She didn't say anything, but I could tell she was sympathetic. There was nothing to say, really, except, "I know."