ORANGE JUICE | Two

When you have been in a car crash, you try to be careful about being back on the road again.

You have rules: Be paranoid but not too paranoid. Look, really look, before you leap. Find out what someone is like, really like. Find out if he is reliable. Don’t jump into anything.

You have been careful for eight years now, and then in one afternoon you break most of your rules. You’re crazy after all. Who measures out her life with coffee spoons – thousands and thousands and thousands of spoonfuls – and then tosses all her spoons aside in one hour?

You’re a fool but you try to be a philosopher. You think – but you know you aren’t thinking and you aren’t a philosopher – what is one afternoon? What will it matter in a thousand years, when you have all turned to dust? Maybe nothing matters beyond this moment: this man, this woman, this moment.

Afterwards – because there will always be an afterwards, because some afternoons are eternal and fleeting, because some things are ending as they start – you’re happy, unhappy, loony, moony, hopeful, fretful, heartened, heartsick. You want him. You want him to keep wanting you. You believe things, you suppose things, few of which you dare say out loud, for fear they will disintegrate in contact with oxygen, sunshine and common sense. You’re flying at breakneck speed, you don’t know where you will land and you might break your bones. Yet some part of you which has been dead for years is, rightly or wrongly, beautifully or painfully, alive now; you’re alive, so alive.