We Both Catch Fire

Waking to the sound of an ambulance siren, I wished to put the rest of the world on pause and go into hibernation. Sleep had eluded me the previous night, for many reasons: a cold draft from a window I was too lazy to shut, the sound of my neighbors exploring their human nature in the apartment next to mine, and the eerie silence that had followed.

Those were all excuses, though -- stories I would tell whenever someone asked why I looked so damn tired. Or I might not say anything at all. I would probably just shrug.

It was six thirty, a whole half hour before my alarm was set to go off. But instead of rolling over and burrowing underneath the covers, I flopped out of bed. After I shut the open window, then walked across the open expanse of studio flat, I started a pot of coffee in my garage-sale Krups machine. I had paid a whopping two dollars for it, and the coffee didn't prove otherwise. I leaned down against the edge of the counter, watching the amber droplets trickle down from the filter and into the glass pot.

His eyes, the same color.

It just popped into my head, and I scolded myself for thinking like an obsessive high school tween.

"You didn't meet Hugh Jackman," I muttered sternly. "It was just a dream."

A dream. I tried to convince myself of it, and failed.

After all, the encounter had made it difficult for me to sleep. Every time I had closed my eyes and attempted to drift off, I saw the picturesque outline of a firm jaw, somewhat pronounced nose and brows, and eyes with a smile of their own. Then the colors filled in, various hues of tan, beige, and auburn, followed by a n external yellowish glow -- the hallway lights from above.

I wasn't even that amazed by his physical appearance. Rather, it was the courtesy I had been shown that really caught me off-guard. At the time, my instantaneous, shy-mouse reaction had prevented me from even processing just what exactly he -- or anyone else for that matter -- had said. He could have told me to go fuck myself, and I would have thanked him just the same.

You can't help your social inadequacies when ninety-five percent of your teenage years were spent in your grandmother's sewing room.

I tore my gaze away from the coffee pot and looked at the refrigerator. The door of it was home to a disorganized rainbow of sticky notes.

CALL GRANDMA.

There were at least ten notes identical to this hanging there. I had never taken the time to remove any of them -- I wouldn't dare. The corners of my eyes twitched and my vision fogged from a layer of tears. There used to be a time when I called my grandmother twice a week, more often in some cases. But she was nearly eighty now, and couldn't remember. She couldn't remember colors, seasons, what day is supposed to come before Tuesday, or her own last name.

And as much as it hurt, I knew that she could not -- and would never -- remember my first name, or the fact that I was her granddaughter, or anything about the long afternoons spent in the little sewing room at the top of the stairs.