I met her that first day when she swept into my room, a gypsy queen of green shoes below turquoise blouse. Her name sported an untoward consonant at its start, emitting a vaguely bohemian whiff that must have prickled the olfactories of someone back in the 60's but had long since gone strange. I could likely dredge that consonant if not the whole name back from the rust splattered memory vats but honestly, why bother. I prefer to remember her, simply and not so simply, as Annie.
As best I could discern, she still lived with her mother in a house in New Jersey, and had so at least since her father died of cancer many years by. In the old way of mother daughter spinsters, they were effectively married and she made no effort to hide from me the oscillating and quotidianly fraught conversations with her mother regarding cable repair appointments and misappointed cats.
A powerful anxious vibrancy flowed in her wake as she bustled in and out of our room, scolding me while I flirted her. A quick dust-up about money spiked the anxiety meters in the already highly metered room -- "I have never heard of such a thing !" -- but my martial marital training kicked in and how quickly I folded. Annie too subsided back to her normal free floating state of New Jersey.
With the proper misalignment of forces, Annie would have been entirely capable of entirely torrid sex - with me amidst the beeping squawking green meters or with some other elastic etiolated relic down the hall - but alas that train had long since departed. So at the end of the day, she kissed me on the cheek and with a nod that was never to be fulfilled, promised to be there in the weeks to come. With that she gave a last lovely tug on my pump and strode from our chemical room into the next. I hobbled down the hall on the arm of my companion and out into the December night.
-2017