A Canadian Graduate Degree Goes to Work in Los Angeles and Leaves His Love at Home
He holds the last moment tightly between his hands, hands smelling faintly of rubber bands and Styrofoam coffee cups. He is trying to shrug off the anticipation of a thousand days of green florescent lights twitching, and faintly purple-hued carpets, and the soft ding ding of elevators, and the lines and lines of people like him—a little baggy, a little saggy-eyed, jaundiced and rich.
He stops shrugging when he remembers the moment of her again. He holds it in juxtaposition to—and, yes, in amazement with and why not—the shimmering soft light of the Pacific Ocean.
He is tired and muddled, his memories have become mixed with the slant of the sun as it tilts between the jolly white boats bobbing in the marina.
Once, in Canadian autumn, she had stepped under the trees and disappeared into deep shadow; her yellow scarf had fluttered into the dry branches. He pulls himself upright as if he might lift away from the seawall. He hovers there for a moment, in a squat, his arms held out in front of him as if reaching for the yellow or, possibly, anticipating a need to block.