...read short stories

I was asked if I would miss this…the States, these familiarities, the relationships of tongue. I barely thought for a moment before abruptly stating, “No.”

How heartless.

But in my understanding of the verb “to miss” I sense regret or sadness…a great loss in the current situation that breeds longing for a former one, i.e. I miss my old job because this new one is dry; I miss my car now that it’s totaled; I miss Jennifer, the loveliest woman I knew. So my immediate answer reflected this truth: that I do not expect regret to infect my travels…and, that I am, indeed, heartless.

But few English words bear such stringent definitions, so I have thus softened, as ice cream over time or in heat. Can “to miss” mean something gentler, so that in doing so, in missing, one isn’t meandering one’s way into melancholic nostalgia, but simply sensing the loss of deep human contact? Of course. Why even ask such a question? Because that’s how words come to rest in peace and page, I suppose.

So my answer is “Yes.” I will miss you. I will sense the loss of our connection. Of course.

But this is not the first time I have done this type of traveling. Nor is it the second or third. Indeed, I have lived a peripatetic life of late. And that, ladies and gentlemen and dad, as Emily Dickinson would say, is a word to hang your hat on: peripatetic. I learned it first from one of those great and thoroughly American creations of wit and word which were so widely read in a more romantic time than this. Short Stories. In 1904, a man by the (pseudo)name of O. Henry serially penned The Furnished Room, a mysteriously beautiful story, like a lace slip over smooth skin. You should read it.

But I digress, mother. Peripatetic. It means moving often. Not staying put for too long. Like a job-hopper or modern nomad. With early years spent on planes, my young skin pinched by aged Chinese calluses, I believe my blood became peripatetic, for its lust of a certain place/time/experience/person is “fugacious as time itself” (Again, O. Henry. Fugacious: more attractive for fleeting. I hang my hat, Em).

So as I have and continue to ‘peripatet,’ I know well the rise and fall of departure and reunion, and though with no heart to store it, will know it again. This time in two days. And I will try to prolong the connection, or perhaps shrink the gap, by writing these blogs, my own short stories, in hopes you will read them and our love for one another will be kindled by a distant flame. Or succulent vocabulary, anyway.

So read them. After all, Simon does say…