I do remember

I do remember the morning. She was looking frail and getting ready for work.
The apartment was a mess and it was snowing outside. I got up,brushed my teeth and got dressed. Then I stood there, in the middle of the apartment. She came over and gave me a nostalgic hug. I think I started to cry. We made love and before walking out the door, I said, 'see you around.'

I had to be at work at ten. I worked at the Philadelphia art museum,isolated on a small hill above philadelphia. I glared at it from a cafe window. A waitress reluctantly brought me a whiskey. Some jobs you take knowing you want to get fired. I was beginning to feel better.

Before each work day the retentive type-a bosses would line us all up and give us a pep talk. This was my second week. Her speech never changed. I was late and terrified that I would burp, so I sat at the far end of the bench.
The boss made her rhetorical ramble of a speech. Half way through, a disheveled girl whooshed in, her
next to me. She wasn't wearing deodorant. In avoiding eye contact with everyone, I noticed a stale cup of coffee next to me. It had lipstick on the rim. I sipped from it.

The new girl, her head bowed, had her eyes fixed on this cup of coffee. "I just found this here, god knows what happened to it.""I don't care." She took the cup and didn't hand it back.

"... and since it's snowing, we'll have an extra coat room open. I suppose you two can be in that one. Make new friends, but keep the old..." the boss said, indicating me and sweaty coffee stealer were to be in a coatroom
together.”Don't these type-A rhetorical bastards know they're killing me?,” I thought.

"Don't those rhetorical type-A bastards know they're killing me?" I said. The coat room had a tall ceiling and you could see the snow fall outside. "They want to share their misery," she said, playing with a piece of
trash on the counter.
There was just that counter between me and the world. About an hour passed. I was remembering.

I moved to philadelphia with a childhood sweetheart. We spoke in rehearsed tones and made love anywhere we could think of. We didn't know each other, and thus needed to be more and more drunk in order to bear the uncomfortable silences.Her slender hands shook as she balanced the martini up to her mouth... a terrible
cheap martini I had made. Money was short, I took a job at the museum.

The night before she had blamed me for her dropping out of school. She had said I was constantly arguing how useless school was, soshe had finally given up on it. She said I was right, that it was full of illiterate, self-righteous, silver spoon eating, idiots. the bathroom. I stared at myself in the mirror, took some of her anti anxiety medication and came out of the bathroom, hoping to make up. She was gone.

"Jesus," the sweaty girl said, "This is good stuff."

"What is it?"

"Whiskey. Jameson," She said, her face brightening. She had one hand on the top, body poised to open it.

"Well, I didn't open it. Did you?" I said.

"No," she said, looked around, then handed me the un open bottle. I rolled my eyes, then opened the bottle. I drank. It tasted very good. Not the well stuff I was used to.

"Where was it?" I asked.

"Lost and found. I need that.”

"Oh yeah? Why?"

"Last night I had three forties, then my roommates put in a tap dancing instruct

"This is stupid," I said. "Nothings happening. Does anything ever happen here?"

"No.”

"This is torture," I said.

"I know," she said.

THe snow was really coming down. No one had checked a coat. We put the closed sign on the counter and walked down the hall to the galleries. She was sweating.

The guards were talking to each other, some nodded at us. Neither of us wanted to take the lead in the galleries. I think we looked at the stuff with clear eyes, not knowing what we were supposed to say, not knowing who
the other person was- we actually looked at the art to find words. We didn't find any. In the stairwell between galleries we stopped and looked at the snow. It was
really coming down.

"That whi

"Yeah?"

"I''ve been eyeing that for weeks. Nobody will even touch it. I was looking for the chance," she admitted.

"We should get back to the coatroom," I said.

We spent the next few hours, mostly in silence, leaning against the racks, occasionally hunkering down to drink. The other employees left early, we stayed. It was an unspoken pact to not leave until the bottle was gone. Sadly, I didn't feel drunk, and I imagine she didn't either. The light in the window dimmed.

"Where do you live?" She asked.

"Ardmore. Funny story.."

"What?"

"I think I'm leaving tonight."

"Sounds epic," she mocked.


The last time it had snowed in Philadelphia, she and I had decided to go North to Cape Cod on a whim, where an old friend of mine was living in a large apartment she
could not afford. She had moved out there from Oregon some time a go with a man she had been with for years. He left some time earlier and I feared for my friends sanity. As we
departed lover's name on it. My friend led us into an over lit, over heated apartment. The walls had pictures of her ex on the wall. There was a completely empty
room off the hallway. My friend worked seventy hours a week to avoid confronting her demons. My lover and I seldom spoke, but made love in the empty room where we stayed during our visit.

"Your friend is a mess," she said. "She depresses me." The sun had set and I was cooking in the kitchen.

"Lets get married." The pace of my cooking slowed considerably.



We were finally excused by our boss. The museum closed and I think, though I'm not sure, we were drunk. I begged a ride off my new friend. She drove hunched forward, squinting into the falling snow, slowly maneuvering the turns. I invited her up to my apartment. I stood there, staring at the mess, feet in a wide stance, fists on hips.

The night before I had torn the paintings of the walls, I remember that. Ien, but I don't know what. I do remember a woman at another bar, whiskey shots and maybe vomiting in a bathroom
stall. Then I woke up and she was in the bathroom getting ready for work.

I grabbed some clothes and asked my sweaty friend to take me to the train station. She did. It's was nearly midnight and I bought a ticket for Cape Cod. I kissed my new friend good-bye, got on the train and left. My new
friend had given me a poem and I held it to the light above my seat. My hands were trembling.

"Too many thoughts
for one head.
Good thing we have two."