Begin

by meeting him in a seedy college bar where names have been carved into the sticky booths and the music is too loud and the waitresses all dropped out of school and eye you with contempt. When he goes to the men’s room, write Danny in a heart on the wall behind the napkin holder. He has a crooked front tooth and a lisp. For some reason, you find both these things supremely attractive.

Listen to him talk about Elizabeth Bishop. Her poem, “The Fish,” the image of its skin like wallpaper speckled with lice. The rainbow, rainbow, rainbow at the end. The way he describes it makes you wish you could share something intensely private, something bigger than your mundane concerns, which you hadn’t realized were mundane until now.

Go back to his room on the second story of a row house on a street you never knew existed before. Promise yourself you won’t sleep with him and do it anyway. Waking up in the morning to the view of an abandoned alley, windows overlooking a series of smaller windows, sheets drying on a clothesline. If you didn’t know it was Poughkeepsie, you could be in Paris. Watch him make eggs over easy with a side of hash browns.  The eggs are too runny, but you eat them anyway, explaining why you prefer them to scrambled.

Or don’t go to the bar that night. Let your roommate convince you to attend her improv show, where you flirt with the guy sitting next to you, a junior who ends up founding a tech company that gets acquired by Microsoft. You’re 21. Your whole life is in front of you. A present no one has opened. You don’t know how it all turns out.

With Danny, you will ask no questions and he will make no promises. Agree to an open relationship, although why would you ever pick anyone over him? He’s spoiled the prospect of other men, like when a fly lands on a sandwich and ruins it.

 The night before graduation, sit on the bed where you’ve made love. How many times — 60? 100? — and beg him not to break up with you. Your heart is cracked. You picture its pulpy red center, frail and exposed as the flayed insides of a squirrel that’s been hit by a car.

What if you took the baby and moved to Seattle? The Space Needle. Pike Place Market. Coffee and raindrops.

What if there wasn’t a baby, only you with your newly minted degree and a suitcase full of optimism?

What if you saved yourself for marriage and marriage never arrived?  

What if you had better options?

The night you met was humid and cloudy. Balmy, he called it. You had on a tie-dyed T-shirt and white denim overalls, ragged at the knee. Your hair looked nice. You could have gone anywhere that night. Did anything. You were brave.

You’ve never been brave. Neediness has always lurked just below your smile. Where did it come from? The womb? The stars? A burden you can never put down, heavy as lies.

Watch him stroke your hair and say I want you. I love you. I can’t live without you. Well, not that last one, which is hokey, straight out of a bad B movie, the films you watch while you wait for him to come home, the receipts you find for gifts that aren’t yours, places you’ve never been.

Measure the careful distance between the two of you, how it expands each year, becoming wider and deeper, a river neither of you wants to cross.   

That girl in the bridal gown, the mother pushing her daughters on the swings, the middle-aged woman examining her flaws – none of them are you.

Remember how the pigs at that farm in Poughkeepsie used to fight over potato scraps, their pink snouts butting each other out of the way, not knowing they would be reduced to sausage soon. Easy to blame your mother. To blame him – he’s closed-off, self-involved. He looks at every woman as though he wants to devour her.

But really shouldn’t you accept some blame? For your utter lack of gratitude that all of you are healthy, going about your lives unimpeded by a car accident, cancer, the terrors of war. Try to develop gratitude the way you force your bulbs to come up each spring. Fail. Try harder. Fail again.

Watch the kids get older and older, preparing to leave you behind.

At the improv night, you kiss the junior under a full moon that glows like an after-dinner mint, low enough to slip into your pocket and . . . what? Does it turn out better with him? Or just different.  

In assisted living, read “The Fish” aloud to yourself. The clarity of the lines scuffing your heart not only because they’re gorgeous but because you live in them somehow, that sense of perpetual missed opportunity. Impossible to re-write the past. Its stubborn contradictions, its pitfalls and promises. Palm trees shift listlessly in the midmorning breeze. A cattle egret skims the surface of the intercoastal, searching for nonexistent fish. The sun a lozenge in the cloudless sky.