Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

by Katie Yee

I embark on my tiny odyssey and pray for a poetic rain. Something to make everyone miserable with me, or at the very least to keep my few escaped tears company. It’s a beautiful spring day. How wildly disjointed it is when the sun on your skin feels like it’s mocking you.

I would only be noticed for my intelligence, taught that climbing up in this world wasn’t supposed to resemble a physical trial. In this way, I learned to live outside my body.

My son is at the age when he takes his obsession with one small thing and makes it big. He has learned to generalize. When his obsession was dinosaurs two years ago, we took him to visit the natural history museum. It was a big day. Father and son, palms leaving prints against the train window as we crossed over the bridge. My husband believed you could tell how good a day it was going to be based on how sparkly the water was. There was a definite shine then. My daughter was asleep on my lap, a weighted blanket.

Being with my husband was like that. Like being a kid, being able to fall asleep on the ride home.

I’m surprised by how quickly it returns. Like a song you didn’t know you still knew all the words to, the way you always instinctively remember your childhood address, your first phone number. Almost like muscle memory, pulling your credit card from your wallet without having to rifle through the slots, or your maiden name always at the tip of your tongue. Ingrained. The things cut into you at an early age, the ones closest to the core of who you are.

After the vague notion of being okay with kids on a philosophical level—the acknowledgment that you are not, say, repulsed or morally opposed on the grounds of the environment, overpopulation, or on behalf of orphans—there is the reckoning with your lot in life. Your financial reality. Your body’s limitations.

They say the intensity of your emotions dulls with age, but the complexity of emotions increases—more mixed feelings, things that are bittersweet.

Summer has always seemed to me the season in which our bodies make their presence most known to us. The swamp of sweat cinched by the elastic of my bralette. Our skin, exposed, in turn exposes our porousness to the world: the vulnerability to mosquito bites and the sun, and though my husband suffers from both, I myself don’t mind. In the summer, we can mark the time passing by the amount of daylight our bodies soak in.

My son told me once that when trees get uprooted (by storms, by people), they feel stress. Even if you replant them perfectly, there is a chance the tree might not survive, on account of the transplant shock. It needs time to establish new root systems.

Are you ever nostalgic for the way the light touches a place? The way the sun holds on to a room? Could you mourn the loss of that arresting sight—the way the light fingerpaints the wall with colors of its own, playful and daring and unselfconscious? The sunset throwing colors like a child before lights-out. One final burst of what’s inside.

And in the end, there are no giant gaping holes, only missing baby teeth the wind whistles through.