I felt a hundred years old when I was five, sitting on the front door stoop of my grandmother�s home, watching the adults barbecue. My facial expression feels the same as it did then with most of the weight of my vision resting on my forehead and eyelids like London haze. I feel myself scowl, frown, sink further into a depression that has nothing to do with sadness but tolerance, instead.
There�s a street that gives the illusion of ending at a cemetery. It was the longest stretch of my life, and I drove down it yesterday evening. Shadows appeared in the dark: Abby, in Catholic plaid skirts, corralling her freckled twin brothers, my first ten-speed bicycle, my sister on roller-skates. A heavy metal swing-set, stolen by time, where Christina got stuck in the baby swing. Sidewalk hopscotch with pink chalk, Michelle walking me home after our first sleepover, our early-morning bus stop down the street from the Hunt family�s house�the family I wanted as my own. A mailbox. A fire hydrant. A grassy lot--a hole between the other houses like the space where a tooth would have been if it hadn�t been lost to decay.
The cemetery grows upward--massive and beautiful in greenness and marble. It looks like a park, and perhaps it was in the time when public park goers picnicked with the dead. My great aunt is buried there and my great grandfather and a handful of others that I�ve never met and can�t recall. I wonder why my sister wasn't buried there. I wonder why we never explored the cemetary during that year when the world ended for the two of us...
Suddenly, I'm brought back, just before the gate, where the street curves sharply and continues out of the city at the slow-motion pace of 35 miles per hour.
I can�t imagine you ever scowling.
I�ve seen her scowl�mostly when she thinks no one�s looking.