Before You Knew My Name

by Jacqueline Bublitz

I am tired of beautiful things making me sad. I should like to love something without turning it over and discovering exposed wires, cheap parts on the other side.

Sometimes a person slips out of your life so easily, you wonder if they were ever really there to begin with.

How easy it is, Ruby will think later, back in her studio, to assume you are the cause of another person’s discomfort or disdain, when the reality is, we all show up with our night befores, our midnight hours and too-early mornings.

People mourn the future that is lost when someone dies. But what about the past? What about all that is bound up in a person, and all the things that disappear when they die?

how do you hold your pain close and let it go at the very same time.

If the living could see all that light, the city maps drawn under the skin, they’d be awestruck. Looking at Ruby and Josh right now, they’d see how nervousness and anticipation might seem the same on the surface, but they’re so very different at the source. Nervousness is rushing water, river mouths, but anticipation is something far more delicate, little bubbles that go pop, one bright burst after another, until the body is a glass of champagne, a million golden beads of air, rising.

How many times does politeness keep us rooted to the spot? We stand on the brink, making a choice whether to tip over into trust or disgust, and we remember all our training, the lifetime of it. The doctrine of nice, the fear of hurting someone’s feelings.