Agency

        On the way to your house, I hit a deer and kept driving. Something urgent in your voice kept me focused on only the unlit country road and the distance between us, and the distance between us was narrowing at eighty miles an hour. I kept my phone pressed to my ear, listening to you explain the parade of tragedies that were released into your life, that had irreversibly tainted your volatile emotions. I had a morbid fascination with the way you stumbled over syllables when you were too moved to think clearly.

        I barely grazed the deer's legs, but I didn't stay long enough to see if it walked away.

.

        Last I saw you, I found you in Providence, sitting on a chain link fence below a college dorm. It was in the springtime, late at night, and you were shooting your spearheaded glares straight into the pavement. Often you glanced up into the yellow window. I told you that she probably wouldn't appreciate you watching her like that. You agreed. I asked if you still loved her. You told me to leave you alone now please and shattered the concrete with your gazes. I walked the grimy night trying to ignore you, but I couldn't avoid your archery eyes so there I held you in my foggy peripheral vision, comforting you with cascades and caresses, your eyelashes falling like thorns onto my shoulder. When I turned away, you were back on the fence directing blitzes in the yellow light. I walked the night, trying to forget you.

.

        On the way back home I could have been driving through the parliament of reality. A detail and a dream and an experience and an ambition and a nightmare all seemed to fold together into one charged and restless night. Maybe there was coffee and scones, maybe there was a kiss or ten, maybe it never ended and was still stirring up the placid dimensions around me.

        That deer was now nothing more than a skeleton, a yellowed jaw and a rusting ribcage beaming into the morning. I continued home, needing and wanting.