Collect Call

Up here, out here, during the spring and summer, they hang these flower baskets from the light poles, sometimes from the awnings and odd gables of buildings. I was looking down at the puddle beneath one this afternoon, it had obviously just been watered fairly recently.

It hit me like a playful slap in the face, the smell of wet concrete. There is something about municipal water spilled onto white gray concrete, it’s got a smell all its own that’s vaguely reminiscent of detergents, perhaps a far away quarry. This time the smell took me back to Southern California with dizzying quickness with smell memories of sprinklers missing their manicured targets and spraying the sidewalks, of washing cars in sun baked driveways, of juvenile attempts at keeping cool.

And then as if the universe were driving a point home, someone passed me on their way to the game throwing off the smell of the fabric softener that your mother used to use. You were there for a second while a bitter break up song played in my ears.

I’m almost tired of being haunted by you. I remember you telling me that I hated it when someone beat me to the punch, and I hated that you were right. I feel all of my passive aggressive tendencies dancing off of me and I want to kill them with my fingers for giving me away.

I realize that even now, by not naming you, by making you somehow mystical by shaking my tail feather around any point, I’m simply falling back on those damnable habits. Are you even real? Are you another tossed off fictional Friday piece?

I crossed the street through that strange lag in time that must occur when a recovering alcoholic walks past the open door of a bar. Each note of music seemed steeped in importance, dripping meanings that were waiting to be gathered. And I’d like to say that I shrugged it off, that I turned my back on my memory and laughed at the all of the wonders here for me today. And I did to a degree, but…

I couldn’t help but wonder what you would have thought about the warm wind blowing in from the water, the faint wisps of clouds in all that blue, the song playing right then.