From the studio: We Are No Longer Accepting Applications for Hers I Might Have Been

Three short fictions for a collage in my Brilliant Wreckage series.

I.

In another lifetime I'd have gone to NYU. I'd have had school spirit, both in high school and in college. I'd know about football teams. I'd still have a boy’s letterman’s jacket in a box in my closet, sealed in one of those vacuum sealer bags, and occasionally when I'm drinking wine alone in the middle of the night I'll unseal the bag enough to catch a whiff of cigarette smoke and Polo and grass. I would be iconic in the memories of my teenage classmates, known for clouds of gardenia perfume and all those oversize rayon blazers in various pinks with large rectangular pockets. In almost every photo from that time I'd be standing legs spread apart, the cuffs of my jeans folded up (not rolled, never rolled), my hands in my pockets, with large sunglasses floating above red lips, my best imitation of Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, a movie I’d know by heart.

There would be a negative in a safe somewhere, and a photo print in another box in my closet, from that department party in the basement I DJed topless, the one where no one seemed the least bit surprised when I pulled my ripped white men's t-shirt over my head and turned the volume up. No one is scandalized when itty bitties show up, especially when they belong to the girl most likely to skinny dip.

I'd have a grandmother notorious in some circles, seen at the parties but not read about in the papers. You'd wrap me in her coat as I'm leaving your apartment two days after all the other Thanksgiving guests. Waiting for the car, my fingers would find a tiny slip of paper in the left pocket. We would try to recover from the mutual embarrassment of truth lodged between us when I mistake you as the author, and I'd spend the next decade unravelling the mystery of N and what they meant, if anything, to a woman I wish I had met.

My longest-time friend would be the college roommate I went to Paris with for that Spring semester abroad, that time spring faded into summer because we stayed a little longer to carouse with our new amis, the friend I skipped homecoming for because the revelry left her with a souvenir she could not keep, and for almost thirty years no matter where we are or who we are with, we play Edith Piaf's I Regret Nothing at 4pm on September 24th.

II.

There was a moment right before I unlocked my car door, before I got in and drove to the coffee shop, before I walked in to what was once a favorite haunt and sat at that table, at our table, with his wife of all people, a microsecond when a perhaps wiser, more level-headed Sidney tapped the glass between the past and that morning, asked are you sure this is a good idea?

I had time to take a beat and consider where I was about to go and who I was going to see.

Did I? Obviously not.

I suppose I hadn’t really made peace with the gaps. While I can’t CTRL-Z back to when the puzzle was incomplete, I know the full measure of what I am pushing away from and can give it all of my strength.

I’ll finish this bottle of wine, revise the label on that chapter of my life, give a polite thank you, but no.

III.

You wouldn’t know it but I slip out of my skin at a moment’s notice, take chances no matter how stacked the odds are. I don’t know it, either, but I have to believe that version of me is out there stringing right along on her parallel thread through the universe.

If I believe in her I must also believe in the woman who is right on time, who doesn’t have to run and make the jump to catch what she might want, who makes her life choices without time ticking in her ears.

I have this collection of windows that always seemed to be closing, choices already in motion: sharing coffee on a Texas porch before the sunrise, adjusting to a Beltway life of access badges and trains and a closet of navy blue, remembering not to talk in our radio voices at home, becoming a Red Sox fan.

When it gets cold I get curious about those things I could only glimpse the same way a person is curious about a place they’ve only ever seen in someone else’s photos. I wonder what a day in the life is like, what my routine would be — where I’d go for coffee and where I’d meet up with friends, if I’d befriend a butcher or a boutique owner, if any of those choices would involve bumper stickers on my car or the solid thighs of a person who bikes to work.

A little shiver now and then, a draft of unfamiliar air.

These windows have a tendency to walk themselves up the frame if I forget to secure the latch.