The Half Moon

by Mary Beth Keane

And then it hit her that it was the same for him when it came to her dream.

“I mean, everyone else here feels stuck. I hear it all day long. But us? We’re not stuck like they are. So why are we here?”

“You love your routine. I’ve never known a single person who enjoys going to Food King on a Sunday afternoon except for you.” Malcolm stood, started pacing. “I do love it, you’re right. But, I wouldn’t be sorry to take a break from it. Can’t a person want two things at once? I need to see something else. I need to go to a place where no one knows us. And with everything that’s happened? I have to get out of here. I have to do one interesting thing. I have to hit the reset button.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “What is?” But what was it he was going to say? It was so hard to capture a feeling and then make it understood, even to Jess, even to himself sometimes. He remembered being a kid, all the things he felt capable of, all the streets and avenues that branched away from his body, all the possibilities. But in the end you can only have one life. One at a time, at least. You could turn, you could pause for a while, but you couldn’t go down two streets at once. The things they didn’t end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song. The lives they didn’t lead were there, too, always with them. Only recently did he begin to see the shape those choices had made.

Why? Because he loved her.