She Just Smiled and Turned Away

I have this awful habit of carrying around these little unrepeatable moments and pulling them out, like old photographs, to mull over. I do this to make myself happy, but they usually make me sad. The first is that dawn in Rhode Island when I sat in a ballroom on the hard wooden floor and watched the sun rise over the Atlantic and the house was so quiet and the sun so bright that, for the longest time, I couldn't think of anything at all. I was completely quiet, too, which rarely happens. The second is my trip to the outer banks with Elias. It was cold and windy, but sunny, and he came over the top of a dune with his curly hair tangled in the wind and it looked like something timeless, like folks might go there right now and, if the circumstances are right, that moment would play out for them, too. The third is the time that my grandma and my cousin and I went to McDonald's for a girl's night out and, scandalously, we were going to order whatever we wanted. And my grandma let us order three large fries and we dumped them in the middle of the tray and shared them and vowed to never tell our parents that we'd only eaten fries. The forth is laying in my backyard with this Lithuanian guy who always smelled so warm and dark and good, just talking or staring up at the stars. We saw a satellite pass over head twice. He didn't fall in love with me, though I wished, twice, that he would. The fifth, of course, is when we girls went skinny-dipping together in the dark in the middle of nowhere. Reading back over this, I think I often feel out of place. Most of the time, I revel in being the girl like no other girl you know. And sometimes, I envy you your certainty.