Wednesday, July 05, 2006

The first thing I realized when I woke up this morning was that I was completely incapable of speaking to anyone. There isn't anything wrong with either voice or throat, but I'm positive that if I tried to answer your questions nothing would come out at all. Just a panicked look about the eyes and a fish face.

When you walked over your smile had that new car smell and I knew somewhere in the backs of my knees that you were just the sort I'd like to test drive. I didn't, but right now I like to think of us sitting on the dock with a bottle of wine between us, talking about our individual unrequited love affairs.

The care-and-feeding tag of one of my new shirts advises me--in several languages, one of them, fortunately, English--that I ought not dry the thing in direct sunlight. Which makes me think of Gremlins.

Eventually I found myself in West Seattle at a party full of acquaintances. Sitting on the seawall alone, missing my balcony fireworks, I realized that the place to have the No Reason Sads on a national holiday was probably not where I was. And that was good to know. (I've decided to turn all the No Reasons into learning opportunities. It's the only way to get through them.)

I ended the night in a convertible, top down and freezing but thrilled with being windblown. It reminded me of my very first Seattle Fourth of July, after the party guests went home and Mark and I drove around town very fast in his little red car that he'd brought back from England, scared and shrieking about being a passenger on the driver's side on the Viaduct in the middle of the night.

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