“Closure”
Posted on March 16, 2008
I saw Sami in her pickup truck on the 10 East headed toward downtown. She was parked just to the left of me, midday backup at full thrall. LA is a city of small traffic windows, roadways successively open and closing like castle doors on a miniature golf hole. Just five minutes earlier, I would have watched as she hurriedly sped off of my flank, her little Dodge racing as swiftly away as she disappeared out of my life. Maybe I would have gasped, then shivered, shocked at the sight of her after almost a year, but it all would have been just one instant on the interstate, no intimacy of words or discomfort of shared space. There she would go, just as before, briefly by my side and then nowhere to be found, and in true LA fashion, it all would happen while hardly happening at all.
But that’s not how it went. An eight car pile up, so demolition derby-like it was aired that evening on the six o’clock news, reduced the moving lanes to one, and then none, as emergency personnel attended to the injured and crews arrived to clear glass and fenders to the side of the road. I don’t know how long we were sitting there—I guess it was a minute or two—before I absently looked over and saw her in the next lane, dictating into her tape recorder. It was a habit she’d described to me the first time we met; a way to call herself on hubris, though it hadn’t worked for her so far.
My first thought was how difficult it is to hide in the front seat of a car. I raised my arm against the door, leaned my head into my hand, tried to make myself so small that I’d become invisible. But there’s something about hiding which implies a latent surrender or guilt; and the truth was I’d done nothing wrong. Staring at the radio, my mind slipped back almost a year to when Sami made me feel like the smallest man on earth. For months, I struggled with those feelings. First abandonment, then insignificance. The idea that a person could be held to so tightly and then so carelessly let go.
The thought of it blew a fresh wound into me, and I realized what I had to do.
I took a breath, my heart galloping like a racehorse, my hands getting that subtropical feeling. Then I made sure the cars in front weren’t moving, opened the door and set foot into nowhere. Read more
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