a prologue

Why do I look at another woman's legs and sometimes see the tiny scar on hers?

"Tell me the story," I used to say, my fingers brushing over it.
"It's from a roller skating accident when I was a kid."
"I know."
"Then why did you ask me about it?
"I just like to think about you roller-skating when you were a kid."

I can remember the way the light reflected differently off that small patch of skin on Caroline’s thigh, as if off of smooth plastic, but I can't fucking remember which leg it was on. Sometimes her hair smelled like strawberries, but I can't remember what brand of shampoo she used. One of her ears had a second piercing, a small hoop she wore directly behind the first hole; several nights I have lost sleep trying to picture if it was the left ear or the right.

The church gave me one month's pay as severance. Why did I use all of it to buy an anniversary present for my wife who moved out five days earlier? I imagined her coming home, repentant, and the tears when she realized she had already been forgiven.

I never gave it to her.

Why do I have to remember the color of her eyes, like the horizon, where the sky meets the sea? She was beautiful. She is beautiful. Why do neither of those phrases sound exactly right?

If I had my choice, I wouldn't remember any of those things. I wouldn't remember the way the house felt without her, empty, worse than empty. Abandoned. I wouldn't remember the sound of nothing in the days that followed, the way the sun rose and the sun set and the food dropped off by my parents piled up outside my bedroom door, but I never heard her voice. Or the way my fist hurt when I cracked my Nissan’s windshield the day she sent her mom to pick up her clothes, and how it scared me when I realized I liked the physical pain more than the emotional.

But I do.