comes with age

It didn't need to be something to get through. But then there was a message left on my voicemail: "I've been going through my things, throwing stuff out, and I found this letter from 68 Jackson street. Do you remember writing this poem?" Followed by a clearing of the throat and an impassioned recitation. Then there was a phone call at nine-thirty on Saturday morning. "Batshoo Magooo! I'm up in Maine, here with Moses. I can't keep him any longer so we're going to release him to the wild. Do you want to say goodbye?" He held the phone up to our partially decomposed pet tumbleweed, so I could coo a goodbye across the wires. The following day, this e-mail: "My parents and I gave Moses a Dixie-land parade down the street to the river, then we tossed him in and I sang a fitting hymn: Give Joy or Grief Give Ease or Pain/ Take life or Tumbleweeds away / But let me find them all again / In that Eternal Day. It was a guezfully good time!" A few nights later, my buzzer rang. "Hawooo!" he shouted from the street. He bounded up the stairs two at a time in his customary whirlwind and squished me into a giant bear hug. For five minutes he talked about how much fun we used to have, recounting adventures. We sang the goat-song game on the top of our lungs, and a second later he was gone again. "Gotta run!" disappearing down the stairs two at a time. The following morning he called from work. "Can Jen and I have our stoop sale in front of your apartment? Your place gets better traffic than ours." But then, on the morning in question, he never arrived. The sidewalk in front of my house was empty, and he didn't answer when I called. "Sorry!" he said late that night. "We decided to have it somewhere else and I forgot to tell you." The day he and his girlfriend were supposed to leave for Portland, he called me. "So you know the frames I made with our road trip pictures inside? Well, they wouldn't fit in the van. If you want them, I'm putting them on the sidewalk next to the trash." When he hung up, I found I couldn't move. I called him back. "Do you have a spare second? It would be really nice to say goodbye. Like a proper goodbye." "Oh… Uh…I'm really frantic right now…" "Oh. Well, ok… Goodbye then." The night he left, it got dark early and a new chill lay in the air. Sitting on my bed trying to read, I suddenly knew what I wanted to do. I grabbed my camera and walked the three blocks to his house. I would take a picture of them- our roadtrip photos lying on the sidewalk. But when I got there, the frames and photos were nowhere to be found. And I was just a girl poking through the trash in front of her ex-boyfriend's ex-apartment in the middle of the night. That is how the story ends. "Good riddance," I said out loud. Then walked home in the dark.