You have long outlived the moment when he buried his Swiss Army knife in the planting box outside the courthouse to avoid triggering alarms. As if the two of you hadn’t already set off enough alarms—enough to frighten and injure each other, driving yourselves into that courtroom. And that was so many years ago.
Now, you can observe those figures with detachment, even pity. They are characters in a novel you might discard—so worn is the story, so shallow and self-absorbed are the people. At first, you aren’t inclined to forgive them for being as young, as ignorant, as you once were.
Place the woman instead on a ledge of schist in a city park. Etch wrinkles around her eyes, her mouth. The rock beneath her is five hundred million years old.
She, past seventy, wears an old purple Indian cotton dress, slightly frayed. The fabric almost rhymes with the fractured schist. A glacier, melting, has left her there. She has survived her own violence. She may even begin to tell a story.
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