She’s going to do the earring thing.

As if happening upon Taylor wouldn’t have been enough of a fiasco, I have to do it when she’s on a fucking date. Suddenly I’m remembering all those songs I can’t listen to anymore because of her, how I can’t smell jasmine or even think about pancakes on a Sunday morning while wrapped in blue bed-sheets without a sentimental panic, how my lampshade still has her grandmother’s old broach pinned to it from when she was undressing and stuck it on there so she wouldn’t forget it. Now it makes this strange abstract pattern on my wall whenever I turn on the lamp to read by its half-light.
It’s funny, of all the places I’ve avoided – the farmer’s market, the Crow Bar, our favorite coffee shop on 19th, not just those places but whole neighborhoods and streets – to run into her here, eating Vietnamese noodles, with some curly haired man that is wearing tight gray jeans and some big gaudy turquoise ring on his finger. Well, I’ve imagined this happening, dreaded seeing her and having to face her with those green eyes, with those red spots in her left eye that always reassured me that she was so unique, but I can’t even figure out how to handle this – it seems to be worse than any encounter I could have imagined at the market. I imagined we would have had to ask each other blank, not too personal questions about how we’ve been living, how life is since we’ve been apart for the last six months. I could handle that. We would distractedly act like we’re selecting the ripest mangos or something. We would pick up and softly squeeze the fruits in their skins, poking them to see if they are soft, as I would pretend that I haven’t missed her, that I’ve been inspired and productive with my sculpture, that her broach, shaped like a bee with its opaque agate in the middle isn’t still pinned to my lamp as if she were going to wake up tomorrow, give me a side smile, embarrassed that she’s forgotten it for so long and pin it onto her scarf.

She looks good today, but I’ve seen that green dress before, I’ve even seen her wear it with that black cardigan. I know she is going to do the earring thing with this guy. I’m sure this guy will be a sucker for it. She takes her long red sideswept bangs in her palm, this tress of hair that has a perfect wave to frame her face, but is horribly dry at the ends, and smoothes it aside, then she pulls tenderly at her long earrings – the silver ones with cloudy amethysts – she always wears them. For some reason, as she does this, her neck looks fucking perfect, even her ears look fucking perfect, and it does this thing, or at least to me, that makes you think she’s the craziest, most beautifully flawed, best woman imaginable. She’s doing it now: the hair smoothing. I should walk over there, walk to the restroom, maybe she’ll see me, maybe she’ll turn her short dark eyelashes towards me and dump whatever hipster fuck she’s with.
But as I’m watching her, she’s doing the clever earring tug, this perfect endearing fidget, I can’t help but watch this whole seduction trick unfold but only see her canvas bag with the calla lily print on it, and those books peeking out the top that she would carry around but never actually read. I see how she’s pursing her lips ever so slightly as he speaks, laughing as if she’s interested – that laugh that rings tinny when disingenuous – I heard it when she met my friends, and seemed completely at ease, until she told me later that they lacked intellectual capacities, that one of them clearly doesn’t understand the subtleties of semiotics or something.

For some reason now, I think I have seen that earring tug exactly one too many times to be charmed by it again. And for some reason now, I don’t know if this realization or missing her is the greater loss.

He sits inside the bar, pulling at his top lip with this finger and thumb, watching her cross the street – seeing the new darkness that now exists at five in the evening, seeing only sheets of rain, a light gray coat, edges of her dress, her brown boots with the broken buckles. She has on her orange knit slouchy hat, always that hat which sat back on her head and revealed only the wet ends of her straw hair. He knows that dress is really a summer dress, remembers how he could see the outline of her legs through it when August light pushed through the sheer cream fabric with its red and brown round design, how that dress smelled faintly like clementine oranges, citrusy and peppery when she wore it, when she sweat in it in the summer – when they would ride their bikes to the river or the market for peaches to can. He sits with some apathetic irritation, watching her look up and down the street, back and forth at the traffic signal that forbids her to cross the completely clear two-lane street that would lead her across 42nd and into the bar. “She’s prolonging it,” he thinks, looking at the scratches in the old glossy wood of the table, looking at words people carved after he takes an amber swallow of his pint. He knows that she wasn’t prolonging it – not consciously at least, because her inability to jaywalk had bothered him for as long as they had been seeing each other – three or for months. It bothered him in the way that some innocent quirk or habit bothers anyone about the other – it’s minimal and personal, so to bring it up would seem aggressive and hurtful, like shaming someone for the way they hold their fork or for the way they discreetly play air guitar. He didn’t say anything, but it bothered him. He didn’t know why, but it bothered him.
He had chosen this bar because it seemed to be a safe middle ground: not the comfortable dark, red-and-green striped booths of his favorite pub where he was a regular, because it would make her uncomfortable; yet he couldn’t choose some hip new place because that idea seemed terrifying and required too much effort. Thus, he settled for the Moon and Sixpence – quiet enough, enough things hanging on the wall to look at aimlessly, enough noise to sink into his ears if she got drunk and started talking and talking, close enough to home to stumble, in case he did.
She walks in, through the oversized red door that dwarfs her as she passes through it, and stops to unwrap the coral scarf from around her neck, twisting both the scarf and her neck in strange opposite directions so she can look around. Not seeing him, she walks past the three middle booths to the back, and into the bathroom. He watches her from the corner booth on the left, by the window, where she walks straight past him, still soggy in her coat from the late November rain. He sees her dress, peeking out from the bottom of her coat, and that the fabric is soaked through, and he knows that she won’t smell of spicy tangerines, warm sun, bike rides, grapes stems and peach pits this time in that dress – that the dress will feel different now that she is wearing it over her rough winter skin. He knows that she will smell like she has just showered – which means that she will smell faintly of dampness and the lingering scent of pear shampoo, vanilla lotion and the talc-y smell of deodorant. Mostly, he will just remember that she smells like wet hair and cigarettes in the winter. He takes her overlooking him as some last and final sign that clearly this whole thing hasn’t been working, as though people meant to be together should be able to recognize and find each other in any setting, in different lifetimes, bodies, states, times. By this point, the beer only has one last warm sip, and he doesn’t even feel the need to chide himself for such blatant romanticism. I just don’t have it in me, he thinks.
She’s been in the bathroom forever, he thinks. She is prolonging it.

The bartender keeps serving drinks and running tabs not as if she is working, but as if she is swaying to some constant wind that is pushing her from one motion to another. Seamlessly she reaches over to turn up the stereo and some song that he remembers from college starts up, and it sounds to him like the noise blushing would make- not embarrassed blushing, but good-feeling blushing – a haze in the face, a slow mellow warm that sunk down to his feet, so that he finds his broken-in old brown oxford shoes silently keeping rhythm in slow waltz time to the soft thump of the drums. He recognizes some of the lyrics from this song that he remembered listening to years ago, back from before the singer had killed himself. He remembers the song carries itself, even though the singer’s voice is something that could either astound you, or cross over your ears without forging its way in – depending on who you were. He leans back in the booth, rests his head against the back of it, but to the side so that he is still looking at the street she crossed, at the stop sign, at the traffic light, at the empty parking lot of the beauty school, which is as far as he can see in the foggy downpour.
She finally sees him, still in his big khaki coat and rough darkest blue sweater, his hand brushing through his ginger beard, little lines forming around his eyes as if they had been drawn in pencil and then erased. She comes over and pulls herself into the booth across from him, slides across the black plastic leather, which squeaks awkwardly as her soaking wet coat slides across it.
He looks over without remembering to tell his mouth to tell a smile, he sees her and thinks that he’ll always remember that she was pretty, even if he just remembers that hat, those spectacularly big eyes and black glasses. Pretty, I can’t even think of a better adjective, he thinks with some unfounded dissatisfaction – he doesn’t even know if he’s dissatisfied with himself or her. The line “Got me singing along with some half-hearted victory song,” and the guitar beats that follow fall into his ears from the song that is almost ending, and the line resonates perfectly- at least in his mind- as they sit, and stare at each other, knowing that they don’t even need to say what they thought they needed to say, knowing that Portland in winter is a strange, if somewhat rhythmic existence.