Life is sad. Here is someone.

The water was running along the eaves and dripping, raindrops as racecars. I stood there under the shelter looking up at them, how there are tiny dramas going on all around us that we fail to notice. I’m sure I looked pretty dumb to the other people coming out of baggage claim and looking around for old friends.

She pulled up in her fading Volvo and I fast walked over, taking a long step off the curb but still hitting the outside edge of a deep puddle. I got in and gave her one of those awkward getting-into-the-car-after-not-seeing-each-other-for-a-week-and-missing-each-other-even-though-all-we-did-these-days-was-fight-all-the-time hugs. The windshield wipers clacked out the passage of time, and I bit the inside of my cheek.

The way she drove was squirrelly with hard manual shifts that were fun for her, how she pretended at the precision of a machine, but caused me to tense my legs against the glove compartment. She said she was feeling drab and kind of sleepy, so I should talk, just say whatever came up.

I thought for a second and then said I like that poem by Tao Lin, the one about stealing from Lorrie Moore. I said I could relate as a writer. She said I was so full of shit sometimes with the self-involved writer stuff, which was said lightheartedly. I didn’t take it that way. A minute went by and I said sometimes I felt like I was dying faster than everybody else, and she laughed. She slammed on the brakes because the people in front of us had all slammed on their brakes. The wipers clacked at each end of their circuit.

Right then I almost told her about staring out the window of the plane watching the diorama landscape unfold, clouds over land, and realizing that there was nothing much for me these days, how maybe love was a finite supply of civility and trust and tensed knees in car rides. That all we had left was empty companionship and someone to pick us up from the airport. Instead, I asked her how work was going, and I listened.