It’s a very British thing to do. Queue. They say it’s their national past time. I reckon they’re right. I reckon it has a lot to do with the NHS and that pervasive politeness they’re all decked out in. The kind that holds firm until it outs itself in the form of sarcasm. Extreme.

I dreamt last night he queued down into a mine and never came out. When I woke I could feel the loss but not the face so I kept asking ‘Who?’, until I remembered. Then all I wanted to know was ‘Why?’. Why was he down there in the first place?

I somehow ended up back home. With a big lump of hurt but no tears running from my throat to my stomach. Bunched up in the middle of my chest like an ole bull frog. The kind that use to sit by the creek bank and holler and look ugly when we were kids.

My father and my brother were trading my car in for a new one. New car new life. I said ‘What kind?’ and they said ‘Ford’. I asked ‘What colour?’, they said ‘Doesn’t matter’.

That seemed to be the default. Fords and fathers. An old farm high on a mountain that looked much smaller than it use to. Than it once was. It’s the Elementary Effect. I reckon. Where everything seems just so when you’re stuck in grades K though Six. Then you grow into high school and go back and wonder how you ever fit in all those tiny rooms and tiny chairs and tiny toilets.

I grew into something else and went back and wondered how I ever fit.

When I left home there was a song that played on a country music station. Wide Open Spaces. I somehow turned it into me and my-life-then because that’s what you do. A few years later I heard it again and thought Isn’t it funny how green and grass sometimes suffocates me? How most times, if I think about it, it does. How pavement pizza and all its stench and foulness is often more preferable. More desirable. Than a field of trees and country side? I thought these thoughts then. In the middle of Fords and fathers and some foreign place I once called home.

But he was still down in the mine. And I was still covering my face. Trying to breathe deep the air cupped to it. Still shaking my head. Unable to cry. Unbelieving, because ‘He’s a city boy who’s never even seen a lightening bug. So what was he doing in that mine?’

You don’t have to go home but you can’t…stay…here…

Ten years ago this summer. We drove around in the warm and the sun with our hair up and our windows down and sang the words and thought “This is it. This is us.”

It was our anthem. Our summer song. To dream to and believe in. Real. Absolute.

We saw beyond the fear we didn’t know was there and saw ourselves. Somehow.

Just like Madagascar and Jasmine always reminds me of him. The places I’ll be from…always reminds me of you.

When or how I knew is still something of a mystery because it all came at once and with such force, the way knowing sometimes does, I wasn’t sure I knew at all.

I looked at the napkin, yellowed with age the same shade as Sarah’s skin; and at the silverware, Edwardian and platinum; and at the box, the coffin that held it all together, and thought about how it wasn’t really empty so much as full.

With Sarah and her full flouncy skirt sitting upright in it and leaning over the lip to chat with the girls in theirs, like you’d lean out of the bath to reach for a robe or a towel or just to have a word with someone on the other side of the door.

The other side…

I wanted to cry. Not the kind of full-on-everyone-can-see-and-hear-you type of cry that had never been my sort of cry anyway. But the kind that fills your insides in a low hot simmer and threatens to boil out your eyeballs and through the tips of your ears and nose and fingers and toes - if you’re not careful.

I looked at one of the other girls, looking at me, and saw she was about to spill over too. Those big watery eyes - more like an anime than any plain girl from Palo Alto. (She wore a badge that said said ‘I’m from…’) She held out her hand - Sarah and the other girls still chattering away like a barnyard full of chickens - and said without saying ‘Give it. I’ll tell her’. And I was happy for her to do it; but heart-hurt too because, who was there to tell me?