My wife frets, and though I had never seen someone fret I
suspect it looks as she does now: all fingers knotted up like
abandoned knitting projects, brow scrunched up in
concentration. It’s that same furious entanglement that got
her through repeating high school—once in Japanese and
then again in English, a language I know she hates with a
hatred blacker than the abandoned well where she’s tossed
heavy bucketfuls of her youth so that she could become
someone. And she has. But she frets, and in her eyes I see
an impossible horizon that recedes as fast as she runs
toward it. She chases a dream that died before she was born,
and I don’t have the heart to tell her; that’s not my place.
My place is tapping my bank card to pay for the cheesecake
in this warm café with jazz low on the overhead speakers
and no one else but us at noon on a Saturday because the
sky is lousy with rain. “I’ve got it,” I say, because I know
for as long as we sit at the handmade wooden table, with the
weather pressing against the window and the sweet pieces
of dessert portioned out forkful by dainty forkful, those
knots will loosen.
2023.09.05 – 2023.12.03
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