It feels unfortunate that I've used up almost all of my highlighters and its only halfway through the semester. I bought an entire packet of them one morning while on a hasty shopping trip. It was quite early and the mall was just waking up. Staff came in trailing toothpaste and fresh deodorant, unrolled the store shutters, took their posts behind espresso machines and cash registers. I like the mall that early, it feels private, like someone's living room.
My mum and I bought school stuff and ate pancakes. Although that wasn't the morning I ran into James, for brevity's sake I'll say it was. James was with his new girlfriend, her pregnant belly in parachute pants. I was, as I've mentioned, with my mother. He said hello and I stammered out a few sentences and my mother smiled and wiped coffee foam from her mouth. Was James really thinking what I thought he might have been? Who knows.
About a year ago we'd been stacked together on the sofa at my house like cord wood and I had been his first real girlfriend. Our bodies - his long and calculated, mine short and flustered - fit together in an unromantic way that allowed us to share a single bed without problem. Now I like to spit poetic cliches at James in my head. His eyes were like an accusation? He saw straight through me? He was a bird on the brim of my fountain of blood? Never mind.
If he was thinking one thing, him next to his sensible blonde girlfriend with a belly full of kid, it was that he had grown up and I had not. He was benignly blossoming while I, malignant, retracted and became denser.
I'd really like to say fuck him and hurl my used highlighters at his memory. I'd like to, but it doesn't work that way. Again I'm left with no neat aphorism to seal things with and, fortunately, no pregnant girlfriend. I'll just have to underline things instead of highlighting them for now.
