Georgia
By Jenn Zipp
On my way to work, I thought about the way she looked. Her floppy mess of hair like a cape in the wind, the caked toothpaste at the corner of her mouth, her return to the commune that she lived in, her 18 year old logic and the patches of wood flooring are all etched in my memory.
I thought about the way she opened the envelope the day before and nonchalantly tossed it aside on her bed, not bothering with the contents, not even so much looking at the address to make sure that it belonged to her or that it was from me.
And then I thought about her and the party. I remember passing an empty bottle of champagne around, each of us writing something on it to commemorate the evening shared amongst idealistic young-folk. And when the bottle came to me… I drew a blank. I looked around at all these faces, mouths open laughing and chest heaving with content sighs. We were all looking for something that night. Whether it be love, passion, a way, an answer, the answer. We spoke in idioms and regurgitated logic that great professors in lecture halls spouted, their master’s thesis delivered verbatim. We tried desperately to sound older than we looked, but our IDs wouldn’t get us into a decent bar in town.
We were content with the night, putting our feet up, leaning back, tired from our journey to nowhere. “It’s an empty search”
That night, she got out of the cab and said “Trust me, everything is alright.” She kissed me with her lips but her mouth was somewhere else, making love to someone in another city in another time and I could taste how much she would rather be there than with me.
I heard that song and I thought about the night she laughed so hard that she fell into the corner booth of the diner we use to see her at. She use to dance to words not sung in English as we filled our throats with the warm burn of hard liquor smuggled in a coat pocket. We did whatever we could to forget that we were on our journey had taken a turn for the worse and she just danced… all limbs, all elbows and knees, like a marionette who was free of the strings that steered her.
And I thought about her as I sat on my porch aching for a cigarette even though I don’t smoke. I thought about all her ways and all her faces that she makes that correspond with a feeling. This is sad. This is happy. This is angry. But she didn’t know what face to make when I told her “I don’t love you anymore.”
So she just stares at me and I see the tears welling up in her big eyes. She shrugs and I think about kissing her but she’s gone too soon. And all I want to do is hold her and watch her crumble into me. She already is and I can feel her hot tears on the nape of my neck. I can see her shake and shiver when we sit on the porch. But she’s gone too soon.
She’s goes to someone’s house and sweetly leans her face in the palm of his hand. “You’ll be kind” she thinks to herself, “you’ll be sweet” and slowly wraps her arms around his neck, her legs around his torso. Their bodies tangled into one another, all elbows, all hope, all knees, all lost, all hands, all , all , all. “You’ll… do,” she thinks.
At the party, I sat with the pen in my hand, the tip resting so nicely between middle and ring, the champagne bottle propped on my thigh. She saw me. Made a beeline to me. Kissed my cheek. Squeezed my hand. Told me that it would be okay.
And I think about her searching, the contents of that search as empty as the bottle. I hope she knows that I think about her often.