Phases of the Moon
an excerpt

I work at the library; I get to know people. I see the same people come in and out every day—the college students with their heavy messenger bags; the mothers with their small broods of children that check out flat cardboard books with pictures in bright colors; the man in the business suit who reads the newspaper in a chair in the back corner every night (I assume he has a lot of loud children or a very henpecked wife that makes this impossible at home). There is Madge, one of the other librarians, with her hair that looks like steel wool and the glasses on a chain that rest on her enormous bosom. She looks matronly, a word that I’d never thought to apply to anyone before I met her—it seemed outdated and Victorian, but she sails around the library like a modern Lady Bracknell, if Lady Bracknell would have condescended to come from Georgia and have an accent that sounded like peach syrup. Then there is Chloe, thin and svelte with her short, bleached hair and her chipped nail polish, younger than I am but wiser somehow. She is street-smart, sensible, the kind of girl who manages to juggle loving books with loving hole-in-the-wall bars and men of little repute as well, and coming out of it all with her hands clean. She intimidates me.

The library is my world, with its millions of pages and decimal placements, alphabetization and sensibility. The floors are clean, the stained-glass windows always casting jeweled light on the floor in the lobby. It is quiet. My life now is quiet.

Jack is a doctor, a psychiatrist at a small hospital on top of a hill on the other side of town, a gated place that made me feel as if I’d done something wrong every time I brought him his lunch. His days fly by at an inland speed of a hundred and seventy miles per hour; when I think of him at work, I see a subway station in my head, with him standing still in a blur of color and rush, but he is calm and steady as always, with that faint condescending turn of his mouth that somehow makes people feel confident in him. His colleagues are few, people that I have met at Christmas parties and summer barbecues, people whose faces blend together inside my memory like hot runny plastic, indistinguishable but trustworthy, people who have worked hard for their capability and knowledge.

Jack meets new people every day. Jack checks them out, checks them in, checks them over, and he remembers every one of them. Someone told me once that when you learn things, you develop new wrinkles on your brain. I don’t think that’s true, really, and it seems kind of disgusting, but if it is true… Jack’s brain looks thousands of years older than mine, by sheer dint of knowing so many names. My brain is smooth and teenaged, his decrepit, like I imagine Methuselah might look. His mind is an old man with a cane, while mine is a young whippersnapper wearing sixteen-hole Doc Martens and a cheap plaid miniskirt.

Maybe that’s why he left. It exhausts me too, just thinking about it, how many names he knows and how busy his hands are, how big his world is. I can’t blame him, even though I keep trying. I would have been frustrated watching me come and go, always the same patterns, never a new story to tell. The bicycle parked in the garage and the stack of books by the bed. Comfortable—too comfortable for Jack, I guess.