Excerpt from “Blink”

You’d understand if you could see her. Here, in the Saturday morning street market, a black coffee in one hand, the other gently running over the spines of tattered books on a book table. Everything about her conspires toward composure. Each strand of hair flowing with the others, the perfectly cut line where her hairline parts. She’s not a woman who fidgets. She has the composure of the stone women who hold up temple roofs.

Do the melancholy candle vendor, the grim Belgian chocolatier, the slow grazing market goers feel this way around her? Redundant. Untethered, wanting to hold her hand so as to not float away.

Lost. I’ve lost sight of her.

The market air shudders. Oceans lie down on me. A flock of wingless, cawless birds fling themselves over the buildings, the Saturday shoppers motionless, paper thin and oblivious. Lost.

She turns then and I see her in profile, eating caramelized ginger delicately from a paper bag like it’s a secret between her and the ginger. Not lost.

Silly. I think, silly. Like a child. My mother must have used this word once. Many times. Don’t be silly.

I mention this to my therapist, how I lose her. It’s not the first time. He, predictably, asks how it makes me feel. Silly, I say. He, predictably, looks concerned.

I don’t tell him how I am braced for this pain now, braced waiting for the next sinkhole, for the sound to suck out of the room, and the deep, sea-floor silence to press in.

She’ll turn then, colour gushing back in, and see my furrowed forehead, throw me a subtle lift of her eyebrows to ask what’s up, as if nothing. Silly.