It was a Saturday morning like any other, and I was getting my things together to go out to the market when I got a phone call from my friend. “Hey,” she says.

“Hey you. What’s up?”

“I’m sorry I –”

–freezeframe–

“– kissed you last night,” Valerie said, out of the blue. I turned my head just enough to see her looking at me. She made no more sense to me now than she had last night, when she’d acted just as abruptly. I turned back to the freeway, shifted smoothly into fifth.

“You must have thought, ‘Whoah, she’s pretty hammered’, huh?” she said, because of course it was nothing serious to her, nothing worth thinking twice about.

“Yeah,” I said, uncertainly. “Ha.” Logic wheels turned and clicked in my head, crunching through the data, trying to take all the points and map them into some shape that I might recognize but all I got again and again was NO SOLUTION. You don’t make any sense to me, Val. None at all.

She prattled on, then, talking about I don’t know what. The moment had passed, she’d said her piece. I cleared my throat finally. “Am I taking you to your place?”

“Yeah, Chris is probably asleep by now. I’ll sleep at my place tonight.”

I pulled up in front of her apartment building, finally. She hugged me, said goodnight, and walked up the stairs to her place. When I saw her door close, I drove the four blocks to the beach and parked, staring out at midnight’s ocean, looking for the answers in the breakers I knew were out there in the dark.

I’d had an English teacher my senior year who’d told us that the only person you can’t lie to is yourself. This was fiction, of course: some of the best stories are the ones we sell to ourselves. I sold myself some unlikely tales the summer of my eighteenth year. I’m completely in love with her was one. I mean something to her was another gem — I should have won some kind of award for selling that one to myself. I was achingly lonely, though, and would have grasped at any hint of reprieve dangled my way, and so it was that I told myself this story about how I loved a girl and decided to believe it.

I’m sorry I kissed you last night was the line she gave me, but I never bought it, not on any of the next-days, no matter how much she’d been drinking.

I’m sorry I kissed you last night. It was the theme of that whole summer for us, as I stepped left (one-two) and right (one-two) and followed her as she lead me along in her crazy dance down and around, spiraling down till I caught a glimpse of how frayed I’d become, the dark places I’d strayed, and so bowed out for a round. She found another member of the wait-staff to tango with, someone else to lead in her dance. It didn’t take long.

I’m sorry I kissed you last night. For some reason, in this stolen piece of time, this disjointed moment between words, I tell myself that I know what the next thing is she will say.

– realtime–

“–was so drunk last night.”

“Oh.” I laugh. “No worries. It was a good time.”

She can barely remember most of it, she tells me. So I fill in the blank spots in her recollection, bringing her up to speed on our latest hijinks. We chat for a bit, promise to hang out soon, and then it’s time to go.

I stand there in my apartment for a while, examining these old memories that bubbled up so abruptly, as sudden as the back-and-forth turns Valerie would lead me on, all those years ago. I feel them around the edges, careful with where the old remembered wounds are. Amazingly, nothing is ragged here anymore, not even tender. I play that summer forward and backwards then, and it’s just like any other movie, just like any other chapter you can skip to and shut off when you’re finished. I toss the memory back in the corner where it came from, careless with where it falls. I haven’t missed it, obviously, and I won’t be needing it any time soon. I’m grinning when I walk out to meet the day.

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