an embarrassing poem was written
when I was alone in love with you
------
It was sunny the day she started working here. I can remember driving into work, happy for maybe the first time that year, because I could roll the windows down and smell the air and listen to folk music with the sun warm on my face. It was the first true day of spring.
When she came through the door, there was a pause in the entire office. Or that’s how it feels now, looking back. But hindsight isn’t so much 20/20 with me when it comes to her. Hindsight is biased and makes somethings out of nothings. So when I remember it, there was this pause, this breath in the entire world maybe when she took those few steps and was suddenly in the corner of my eye.
She wasn’t beautiful right at the start, but she reminded me of something I couldn’t name.
She was nervous, I could tell. She sat in the chair by Michael’s door, just behind me, and I could hear her toying with her bag, going through papers, reapplying lip gloss. I watched her in the reflection on my monitor. She was jumbled and awkward and shook Michael’s hand too eagerly.
No, she wasn’t beautiful right at the start.
But I’ll say now that she was. I’ll say that she was the most perfect woman I’d ever seen. Right there in that moment when she stood pigeon toed next to her new desk, thanking Michael profusely and laughing loudly when she dropped her purse accidentally, its contents spilling out onto the floor. (A tube of the aforementioned lip gloss, a pack of tissues, a wallet, a worn paperback, three or four pencils.)
After I’d introduced myself, I asked her to eat lunch outside with me. We ate at the picnic bench outside that probably hadn’t been used by anyone in years. The wood sagged beneath our weight and creaked when she bent down to pick a dandelion from the grass. She had finished her yogurt, but I was still eating my sandwich. She made nervous small talk while she twisted the dandelion’s stem between her thumb and index finger.
I finished eating, but was in no hurry to go back inside. She wasn’t either, because she kept looking up at the sun with this quiet smile and her eyes closed. I tried to teach her how to make a piece of grass honk by placing it between your thumbs and blowing with your lips pressed against them, but after five tries, she was still just sputtering, her face contorting at the taste of grass.
She was beautiful then, but I didn’t think that at the time.
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On her second day, it rained one of those long, heavy early springs rains. I watched drops of rain roll down from her hairline as she sat down at her desk. I watched the back of her hand wipe them away. She shook out her hair just a little and maybe it was then that I knew, but I didn’t because she still wasn’t really beautiful.
The rain was hitting the windows and the ceiling. I can remember the roar when the rain started to fall harder and how she looked up for a second, just stared up at the ceiling with her mouth sort of open like she’d never heard that sound in her life. Her face was all wonderment and vulnerability and I felt this strong inclination to keep her safe then.
I wasn’t in love with her then, but looking back I’ll tell you that I thought I might be getting close.
The rain lasted for the entire week. She laughed at lunch, saying that maybe it was some sort of sign that she shouldn’t be working here. I smiled with her, agreeing and telling her maybe she should get out while she still could. She made a joke about building an ark and when she told me there was a place for me on it, she started to seem beautiful.
Later, as we were leaving for the night, I held her hand as she jumped over puddles in the parking lot.
But I wasn’t in love with her then either.
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Summer that year came with a tidal wave of heat, temperatures reaching almost 100 on some days. The air was thick and heavy. News reports kept reminding me to drink water. Going outside was dangerous. And here are 24 ways to keep cool during this insufferable heat. I bought a huge box of off brand popsicles.
This was also the year the air conditioner broke down.
She came into work with her hair up in a tight bun, little curls would fall out and stick to the back of her neck from the sweat. She wore sleeveless blouses and skirts without tights. Her fiancé brought an industrial fan up from the warehouse and she stood in front of it for five minutes straight some days. Spreadsheets lost my interest when I saw the way her hair blew back from her face in the wind.
Time moved slower in the heat. She let the phone ring two or three times before she reached to answer it. I barely closed three sales most days. People stayed at their desks with their shirt sleeves rolled up, fanning themselves with order forms and memos.
She stood in the kitchen with me, sucking on a popsicle. She liked orange. I liked red. We leaned against the counter and didn’t say much of anything. She finished hers faster than me because she bit into it and when she laughed with a big chunk of orange ice in her mouth, it sounded like my childhood. Back porches and swing sets and those sort of things.
We decided to keep every popsicle stick to keep track of how many we ate during the heat wave of 2002. In the end, there were 47 and she smiled and we spent a particularly uneventful afternoon building a house out of popsicle sticks. When we were done, our roof caved in almost immediately. She frowned and when she went back to her desk, I stayed behind and ate the rest of the box of popsicles to rebuild it, doubling up on the roof this time. I presented it to her at the end of the day and she clapped her hands, delighted and beaming.
That moment with her smile and our house was the closest I’d ever been to love and if I wasn’t in love with her then, it was only because I had no idea that was the name of what I was feeling.
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Fall was short and winter was long. The toes of my shoes pushed through wet, yellow leaves for a month and a half before the branches were completely bare and temperatures dropped to well below average. It was forty degrees by the time November started. By December, it had already snowed twice.
I’ll say now that it was like she came and suddenly everything was in extremes. First the heat of summer, now the cold of winter.
There was a blizzard in January that kept the office closed for three days. Everything was white and the snow piled up, almost burying my mailbox. There were kids outside, running around, throwing snowballs. Laughing. There was the sound of snow plows going up and down the streets. Men coming outside to shovel their driveways and sidewalks.
I stayed inside, dressed in sweat pants and a sweat shirt. I watched the weather reports on TV. Watched the list of closed schools roll across the bottom of the screen, saw that my old high school was closed.
I peered out the window on my way to the kitchen and couldn’t see my car anymore. It had started snowing again, the flakes were big and fell faster than before. They were calling for three more inches before tonight. I made hot cocoa and as I stood waiting for the water to boil, the phone rang.
She was calling me because she was bored out of her mind. Her fiancé was outside like most other men in the city, shoveling away until he’d come back in, complaining about how his back hurt. She said she didn’t think it was possible to miss being at work, but at least there she had something to do. She asked me if I remembered how exciting snow days used to be and I said, yes, I did.
She didn’t live far from me so when she suggested sledding at a nearby school with one of those steep hills kids fantasize about, I agreed. I put snow pants on over my sweats, pulled on my jacket and hat and scarf and gloves.
I trudged through the snow for fifteen minutes to get to her and when she stood there with only her eyes showing through her scarf and her hat, it was worth it. Because the winter white made her eyes bright and her cheeks flushed and I couldn’t see her mouth, but I knew she was smiling.
She was standing in the middle of the street with nothing surrounding her, but piles of snow. The snow was blowing around her and she squinted ahead as I approached. She yelled my name and it was swept away by the wind until it finally reached me and the corners of my mouth stretched all the way to my ears.
It was love then, I knew.
I knew because when we slid down the hill together in the plastic orange sled she paid five dollars for, she held onto me tightly, her arms squeezing me until I felt like I would burst. And she laughed when we reached the bottom, falling over into the snow and she looked up at me and said that she wanted to go again, reaching for my hand.
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Spring came around again with its light, fragrant air and we ate lunch at the old, splintered picnic table outside by the warehouse. Her fingertips would pick at the pieces of wood coming loose while the wind blew her hair about, catching it on fire with the sun. She confided in me that after a year, she’d started to feel like she’d given up on ever getting out.
She was beautiful and I loved her.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Lyrics in the beginning are from Wishful Thinking by Wilco and they're not really all that relevant to the story, but they've always made me think of Jim and they were sort of what started this fic in the first place. Before it became what it is now.
unfold is the author of 102 other stories.
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