How I Met My Wife

It happens all the time, so often that it is something that one rarely notices, like blinking. It is the sense – it could be a shadow almost subliminally perceived by peripheral vision; or a nearly imperceptible sound wave that stirs the cochlea of the inner ear; or a breath of air that faintly brushes the skin or lights upon an eye lash; or what we call the mind's eye that is capable, at times, of seeing everything that is or ever was and, indeed, the nothing before – that causes one to turn, without any real awareness that one is doing so, from whatever one is doing, regardless of the requisite intensity of scrutiny at that moment, such as staring at molecular activity through a microscope in rapt attentiveness whereupon this sense causes the, let's say, molecular biologist to merely, suddenly though less than barely, pan the eyes left within their ocular lobes in a saccadic movement (a microsaccade, in fact), although the duration of the pan and return to refocus on the molecular activity (in this case) may be affected by the intensity of the "sense" that caused the interruption and, in fact, may result in an actual momentary stasis in the panned-left position, the way a lightly sleeping dog's ear or ears tick or perk upwards to capture (impossibly because the stimuli[-us] now reside[s] infinitely in the past) a sound in that upwards-of-20Khz range inaudible to humans, and is so common that if during that moment of stasis the sound of a door opening is perceived or, if one turn's one's head, say, toward the window, and sees a couple of dried leaves being pushed along the street by an invisible breeze, the whole sensory experience scurries along dendrites into neurons and may initiate a cellular memory process called metabotropic glutamate transmission and reside in a part of the brain that functions like RAM storage or fade into a part of the brain's recycling bin until space is required, or the turning away from one thing toward that "sense" of something may reveal that someone has entered the room without your noticing and is standing there, or there is just a sense that someone is standing there behind you, but when you turn there is just the furniture and, say, the streaks of sunlight revealing the dust beneath the rocking chair. So when, as I was about to leave (or was it to go or to return?) I sensed something and turned around absently I hadn't necessarily expected to see her, though it didn't exactly surprise me either, except that the intense light filtering around and beneath the pulled shades, which appeared black with a white corona as in a solar eclipse, caused her to appear mostly in silhouette, save a tangle of warm colors crowning her pate as she stepped forward. As she did, the room behind her, a narrow kitchen with a chrome and Formica table and two chairs in front of the two large windows with shades drawn, an old refrigerator humming erratically intruding, and a door to a back hallway just to her right receded, and as her small frame draped in an off-white cotton dress with tiny blue flowers seemed to float toward me I saw that behind the perfect skin of her face glowed whirling patterns of color and light, all colors and all light whirling in chaotic patterns as though the universe were being born behind her eyes, and as she came closer I recognized her, I thought - from a long-ago reflection in a subway's window; or was she the daughter of the Italian family who took me in during the war after I had fled south from certain annihilation across the Austrian Alps to their small farm just outside of Dobbiaco (I didn't understand a word of their dialect, although I could speak Polish, German, and Russian and had been abused in each); or was she the college student whom I noticed from the twenty-second floor apartment window crossing the rain-streaked streets of the intersection in a shiny red coat with whom I tried to run down and catch but, after walking the night's city streets until dawn never again saw; or did I see her once sitting across the expanse of desks in the university library; or did I dream her – but as I reached out to her, for some reason, I turned briefly to look behind me, another sense, this time of something left undone – and as I turned back to her, she was gone, the room was gone, or not gone but returned to where I had been sitting thinking about going or returning or leaving the unsaid unsaid. I can only now assemble the memory as a sensation, a fleeting feeling that something had happened or is about to happen, was about to happen, is happening, is happening over and over, this assembly of memories and dreams out of nothing but the milky chaos within a white, translucent stone that holds the mystery of time and the why of this something that I can neither name nor describe. I know she is standing behind me, talking from the other room, watching me sleep and listening to me breathe, inside me like a reservoir of tears, like the sea that shaped the stone and wore it smooth with time and wisdom unspeakable knowing that everything disappears. I close the book and reopen it to another page, and again my life is described in sentences that I don't remember writing, in a language I have yet to learn. I am sitting in an outdoor café reading, a thin volume. A fountain is flowing over stone in monotonous crescendos and decrescendos, conversations at other tables drift up into the night like embers, and when I look up and glimpse her across the plaza I notice the straw hat with the black ribbon and the pink drink, and her fingers around the glass's stem, and as I return to the page I have been reading, there she is described on the page exactly as I have just seen her, yet in words that are not afraid to say everything that I have forgotten. And when I reach for my espresso and dare to look again there is no table, no fountain, no she; there is the page, and even the words are gone. I have spent my life dreaming of the language I would use to describe the stars, the music I would compose for the sea, for my daughter, for my son, for my friends who will miss me when I'm gone, for my wife who is standing behind me and who will wonder, even more than I, what these marks upon a page mean. The answer lies within the stone that dreams this whole story. Remember?