He was like the tallest tree in the forest

He was like the tallest tree in the forest, a head above everyone in the crowd, staring straight ahead at the television playing vintage 70s porn on the screen. That, he said, pointing his beer bottle at the scene, that is what I call too high of a standard.

We talked about politics, living in San Francisco, a Tennessee Williams play, small towns in Texas. He mentioned his girlfriend a few times and alluded to the apartment they shared uptown, a duplex they lived in. His downstairs neighbor was a half-deaf elderly Chinese woman who didn't really hear the guitars playing late at night.

Like a gentleman, he put me in a cab when I left, giving me a courtly bow. He handed me his card, placing it carefully in my hand, balanced between the heart and life line on my palm. Call me, he said. I looked down at his name as the cab pulled away and the wind blew around him at cross-purposes. Through the window I watched him walk back into the bar, hands stuffed in his pockets like armor.

The elevator shook and groaned up the nine floors

The elevator shook and groaned up the nine floors, rattling like a cage to a medieval prison cell. The shaking made the edges of their mouths more frantic and jittery, which made him more excited and urgent against her. She wasn't entirely sure if the physical motion reflected what she really felt, but she went with it. It was enough of an adventure.

The doors opened and they spilled out into the room. In the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a curve of -- concrete? No, a curved plank. A skate ramp. Piles of records on the floor. Just a stereo in a corner, but a huge one, huge speakers, huge subwoofers. And pushed like an afterthought in the corner of the gigantic loft, a gigantic messy bed, its sheets falling off. Her head turned to look at it closer, and he kissed her neck instead.

R. pulled her in the room, a small grin tugging at the corner of his lips. Make yourself at home, he said, breath hoarse and warm, as he ran off to the bathroom. She looked around her, but there was nothing really to see -- nothing on the walls at all, just window upon window upon window overlooking the desolate downtown.

She approached the skate ramp, dotted and flourished with graffiti: handwriting, slogans, pornographic figures. She sat down in the ramp's curve, the wood of it oddly warm and wrapped around her. She read a grocery list written in green marker on the ramp's edge: beer, English muffins, peanut butter, popcorn, Twizzlers. It was surrounded by a thicket of words and drawings, crammed together on the surface, as if all the life in the room teemed into one spot like small insects on a lightbulb. It buzzed like a million little voices, a tangle of a life whose edges she could sense but barely touch. Underneath the tips of her fingers, indentations of the carvings felt warm. She touched it absentmindedly, running her finger along its curves and edges. She looked down and realized she was touching a picture of a flying car fucking a bird. Someone had nestled it into the borders of a skid mark, slashed black against the wood.

She wanted to take out a pen and write her name down on the ramp, write "S.P. WAS HERE" with a flourish. Maybe she would draw a cloud around it, or sketch something relentlessly girly, like a rainbow or a unicorn or a daisy. Or maybe she would write a song lyric instead, maybe of the band they had just gone to see; he would be more likely to examine it perhaps, and remember. But then she realized it would hardly matter. It was like a monument, this ramp: it pressed the tiniest details into the flatness of one meaning. It would never leave the room, it would go on accumulating more and more lists, doodles, and names as time passed and made everything fade and weaken. The air in the room would become cold, and only the monument would remain. And either she would blend into it like one small scrawl in a larger drawing, or be erased entirely by the endless motion of riding up and down, up and down, like a wave that refused to bend to shore.

She looked around at the room around her, the space filling with the sound of his approaching footsteps getting closer and closer, the windows revealing the skyline beyond. Everywhere she looked was full of space. She glanced up from the spot she was going to fill, imagining it carved with her name in capital letters, carved so hard that the wood splintered with the pressure at the edge of her knife. She could practically hear it scrape against the wood, practically felt her hand buckle and shake with the effort, fingers coiled tightly around the handle as her own nails bit into her palm.

And there he was, at the top of the ramp. Hey, he said, his voice lazy and affectionate, the word cradled in its echo by the curve of the wood as he skidded down towards her.

The first thing she noticed was how old he looked

The first thing she noticed was how old he looked: old mustard-colored windbreaker, old Peruvian ski cap, even the bits of grey in his eyebrows. It had only been a year ago but already he existed in the realm of the drunken anecdote: the half-incredulous "Can you believe it?" laughed with friends over drinks, the evidence produced in analytic conversations regarding modern romance. To see him drifting towards her on the sidewalk through the wind and sleet -- it was like passing through the frame of a foreign film whose language she had forgotten, a movie she had watched half-asleep and could barely remember.

He passed her on the street, and she looked away -- hiding her face from him in case he noticed that she had gotten older, too. Who knew what he would remember of her? She hoped nothing. Nothing was what came out of it, after all. But he gave her a hard look as they passed by one another, and her face felt hot with shame and embarrassment because she knew he remembered.