Bronson Gao

七月四日

マール

アメリカ

It’s busier than I expected, but not by much. I wonder how long the line is at Chik Fil-A. Good thing I’d never eat there. That makes me wonder what Deadra likes to eat. お寿司か、色々な肉か、野菜だけ食べるのが好きですか。

A man offers to shine my shoes so he can sell me something, but I don’t look at him. I get mixed into the shuffle of a variety of different people, lots of families in patriotic casual-wear, some arm-locked couples—mostly younger—a woman with her seeing-eye dog, some scene kids. I never disliked the feeling of getting lost at large. Being around enough people, you feel invisible.

However, some crowds have been just the right size to give me shit, like a class full of kids—mostly alike—in a small elementary school absolutely anywhere. Blonde or brown hair, brown eyes, ghostly skin in the winter—myself always darker—kids’ll be cruel either way I guess; and besides, not all of them were bad.

You see all human expressions in elementary school, boiled down to bare essentials. And with that in mind, maybe within this silence all around me is a spitball on the back of my head, an Indian burn, a shove on the blacktop. Nah, I’m not invisible, probably not. でも、見られない人もいます。

I enter the food court and sit down across from her. The chairs suck here, I remember now. Maybe some good conversation will make me forget. I hear her nails clacking against her phone’s keyboard. Maybe she’s texting her friends.

She puts it down. “Oh, sorry, you’re here,” she says.

“Sure am,” I say. “How’s your day been?”

“Boring, quiet.” She folds her arms and begins scratching one of them. Her composure is withdrawn, not as cool as it was the day of the party. She’s wearing a black zip-up hoodie with a 3 Floyds logo on it, a decent-sized hole in the right forearm. It’s not at all cold outside, either.

“I’m really glad you came to my party,” I tell her. “Your card meant a lot. I feel like an asshole for not reaching out sooner, but, I’ve been writing a shit-ton of ‘thank you’ cards to people I barely know. Been kept up with that.”

“How’s that been?” She makes eye contact, a stellar flash of curiosity reflecting.

“Mostly boring. Some people I put some effort into, a lot I haven’t,” I say. “Oh, and while I’m at it, here’s yours.” I recoil a little, realizing how this last bit of information sounds in this context: how much effort did you put into it, Gao? “I swear I put some effort into it.”

She laughs in a social and polite way. She doesn’t say anything, opens the envelope and reads my candid-enough, almost-honest depiction of sentiments. I don’t not feel what I said is probably all the truth there is.

“Deadra, I am glad to have gotten to know you as little as I have. Thank you for your support, and I wish you the best in all future endeavors.” I wrote as though I’d never see her again, as if she was going to Chicago or Little Rock or Miami and never back again. And for all I know maybe this whole Ivy Tech thing wouldn’t be it in the end, and maybe the big, wide world would be the place to go for us both, though probably not in the same direction no matter what.

“I was also wanting to treat you for dinner,” I tell her, silence having fallen in the past thirty seconds. That want was without premeditation. It had not existed until that moment, but so it came.

“Thanks so much for all of this!” she says, a flicker of feeling wavering through outward expression like a candle, not dead but less alive than who knows how long ago. I admire it. It’s a whole different thing.

We head to an Asian-sounding place, a murky fusion of Chinese, Thai, Japanese, etcetera. And when we ate, what image matters from this moment is unknown when I still look for it.