The Cold Snap in The District
I spent yesterday sucking alternately on cheap bloody maries and old-fashioned violet mints. It was a day strung together by listlessness and an ever more urgent quest for the perfect level of buzzed-I made it through a movie without passing out, and more importantly without retaining my sense of complete and total reality. But afterwards, on a train pointed toward home, I felt edged in by a sadness that was quiet and untraumatic, and therefore completely present.
I couldn't stop thinking about the banana bread: I left you in bed, rolled in the blanket I had dragged all the way from New York when you told me about the cold. I lit the oven and took out a stick of butter to warm on the counter. I sifted the flour, realized I needed baking soda, not baking powder, took your keys and your sweatshirt and walked to the general store on the corners of Dumbarton and 29th. I locked the doors behind me (though you never do) because I liked the thought of you wrapped safely and sleeping. Georgetown was quiet and I was back in your apartment and out of most of my clothes ten minutes later, whisking eggs into a frenzy and smashing bananas into a syrupy mush. I had hoped you wouldn't wake until it was done and cool enough to cut, but with thirty minutes left on the timer, you emerged from the bedroom and collapsed in my lap.
We ate it warm with butter dripping off the corners and you were happier than the night I fucked up the Beef Wellington. And whenever you're lost in simple satisfaction, you look like a little boy and I always think about the story you told me about an old pair of shoes-- how someone stole them at a youth group camp outing when you were young and you had to walk home barefoot. And how your mother was too poor to buy you a new pair and so a neighborhood church raised the money so that you didn't have to walk soleless through the dirt of Oklahoma. I think about that and my heart breaks with wanting to wrap you up forever.
But it's hard from faraway, and when missing you has become the all-encompassing norm, I wonder how long I can wait.
I couldn't stop thinking about the banana bread: I left you in bed, rolled in the blanket I had dragged all the way from New York when you told me about the cold. I lit the oven and took out a stick of butter to warm on the counter. I sifted the flour, realized I needed baking soda, not baking powder, took your keys and your sweatshirt and walked to the general store on the corners of Dumbarton and 29th. I locked the doors behind me (though you never do) because I liked the thought of you wrapped safely and sleeping. Georgetown was quiet and I was back in your apartment and out of most of my clothes ten minutes later, whisking eggs into a frenzy and smashing bananas into a syrupy mush. I had hoped you wouldn't wake until it was done and cool enough to cut, but with thirty minutes left on the timer, you emerged from the bedroom and collapsed in my lap.
We ate it warm with butter dripping off the corners and you were happier than the night I fucked up the Beef Wellington. And whenever you're lost in simple satisfaction, you look like a little boy and I always think about the story you told me about an old pair of shoes-- how someone stole them at a youth group camp outing when you were young and you had to walk home barefoot. And how your mother was too poor to buy you a new pair and so a neighborhood church raised the money so that you didn't have to walk soleless through the dirt of Oklahoma. I think about that and my heart breaks with wanting to wrap you up forever.
But it's hard from faraway, and when missing you has become the all-encompassing norm, I wonder how long I can wait.