If I told you that I miss my station wagon most when I think of the evening steaming in summer city traffic with a pouting now ex-boyfriend when I suddenly realized that it had long been too dark for sunglasses and, clipping an ear, snatched them from my nose and flung them over my shoulder, then in the rearview mirror watched them crack and crumple and slide down the window-glass all the way at the back or that I never considered religion until I was sent to Catholic school and, obliged to cross myself and hypocritically intone an “Our Father” each morning, promptly identified myself as an implicit atheist
and with a sixth-grader’s self-assurance unlocked the closet door but crouched inside amid my armory of arguments, “confessing” only to the curious; and that even after breaking through the suicidal crisis I was powerless to reason my way out of that spiritual quicksand until I grasped a rope in a book on quantum physics or that the other day in homeroom when some guy I only vaguely recognized called across the room wanting to know first my position in the class then my GPA and SAT scores >and though he and his friends were rather rowdily impressed and suggested I should strut down the hall with a “number one” index finger held high I just wanted them to shut up before gravity and the rushing wash of emotion defeated surface tension and my eyelashes for control of a certain stinging salty solution – would I be more human or stranger still?