Amanda (Not Her Real Name), Part 2

Christmas Eve, 2009

I go to pick up someone I haven't seen in ages. Someone whom I've kept secret from everyone, because I don't know how to explain a lifelong relationship with someone I've only met a few times more than twice and reads me like her favorite book. She comes out of the train station and her overnight bag follows behind her like a dog. She weaves through people while walking next to me, we say nearly nothing. Shes a head shorter, with big brown eyes and the kind of pleading look photographers wish they could get for those ads for starving orphans in forgotten countries. She has small features like people have when you're 15 but she was a couple years short of thirty. Beautiful. Slight. Just enough curves to make most other women check themselves in the mirror.

She tells me about her new life with her boyfriend and her dog and how she doesn't want to see her family on Christmas and her job and how everything has been in the last couple of years. I sit in my car, intimidated as I have nothing to say. I live by myself, I work, I have a couple friends and one or two closer ones. There is no way to talk about anything when days pass one into the next, the details lost to boredom and not caring what day of the week it is. Details die quickly if not looked after.

I take one hand off the steering wheel and go to touch her on the nose. Stupid, strange habit I have with women I'm affectionate towards. She backs away quickly, like a dog who's tail had been stepped on and her eyes huge behind the black rimmed glasses. The look is somehow a mix of fear and wonder.

"No, don't."

I put my hand back on the wheel and my attention back on the street. The people pay no attention to me, but for some reason I have to be aware of them all as they move from place to place even if I will never see this faceless mass ever again, "Why not?"

"Because!" using a conjunction like a child would. She curls forward, her hair bouncing off the purple-blue sweater and she relaxes for the first time though she doesn't take her eyes off me. Her eyebrows are arched now, overemphasized like showing a complete stranger as much earnest sympathy she can muster. She told me things she said she never told anyone else. I've known her for four years, she still treats me like a stranger.

Shoppers move in waves from store to storefront to sidewalk kiosk for last minute gifts. The cars lining the street are choked with the shit-brown snow. Traffic spits dirty water at the passersby. Its as if the city hates the people that live in it. It gives them ugly colors and bad weather and rude people as if to tell people to get out. I feel very welcome in this, I am only lonely around other people.

She makes an odd movement, and she tries to cover up her reaching out for my arm by playing with the fabric on her sleeve. She fidgets and twists and squirms in the seat next to me. When we walk around town, she takes the crook my arm as we cross the street and keeps up half a pace behind me. She becomes warmer, laughing, less like a stranger and more like a gentle shadow of misspent age.

I think about running my hands through her hair and stop myself because of those brown eyes. She accepts a hug willingly but doesn't put her arms out, its all in her eyes. And She gets nervous when she walks up next to me in the college bookstore. She smells like a warm fireplace.

I pull into her parent's house later and she excuses herself for not inviting me in. It would be confusing and they're old world strict despite her personal liberal ways. She doesn't get out. She finds six minutes of excuses to stay, wringing her hands, explaining little random details excitedly - her family's Christmas habits, the music CD she burned for me, where she got the sweater, a story about her dog. She eventually stops herself, takes her bag and tells me not to look at her walk in as I drive off.

I do anyway. She's standing at the front door, looking back into my rear view mirror. The text messages on Christmas start off around five o'clock with "I miss you" and continue on well into the night.