46

Not processing, not wanting to—the little loading screen with the spinning bar that’s just a running in place, an imaginary to fill the time when what’s happening can’t yet be understood. Wheels turning and thousands of bits of information turned into nothing: an image on a screen. Dislocation here becomes a means of holding a sadness at bay, and the sadness of holding that (not reaching out in the arc of your reach) brings with it another weight. Last week it was 20-minute calzones, ice cream from the place across from the other place, baleadas twice in a row, and the tenderness of newly pierced ears. Not in that order, of course.

This week, I sat in my car and watched the sky. In the faded light, a flock of geese flew overhead, and with them, the possibility of everything, for a moment, being released. I had to take a photo to show you. I swiped to open the camera, but instead swiped to mute the volume on the music I’d forgotten was playing. Silence. The same gesture that asks for a pause. The same inability to hold what’s passing by. When I said that I loved you, it was a way of breaking something loose—a door opening to the wind of what isn’t yet known, and the possibility of hands. Who can ever get good at saying goodbyes? Even words yearn for a place without language.