Do You Think This Is Strange? by Aaron Cully Drake Read Free Book Online

the far right corner—an image of a chimpanzee holding both its hands in the air in the appearance of victory. The poster read: YOU CAN DO IT! It offered no clue as to what it actually was. I think it may have been bananas. That would interest a chimp.
    On the table, equidistant between us, her balled-up poem lay. I saw a single word, peeking out.
    hello.
    Her pen rolled off the table and she bent under the table to pick it up. I reached out, took the crumpled scrap of paper, and put it in my pocket. She straightened back up, and we continued our silence together.
    While I ate, I stared at the wall, and a red digital clock counted the time. My mind kept returning to the ball of paper in my pocket.
    Why did you take it? the threads asked.
    I don’t know, I replied.
    What is it?
    I don’t know.
    â€”
    I only glanced at Saskia twice. Enough to remember a girl from ten years ago, hold a snapshot of the past firmly in my mind’s eye, then map it over a picture of the girl in front of me. She was the same, she was different.
    She had more freckles. Her hair was longer. She was thinner. She was older. Taller.
    Prettier.
    She was the same. She wore a white wool cap like the one she wore then. She was different. She wore grey Bose headphones overtop of the cap. Her jacket was pink, which was her favourite colour then. But her shirt was white with red polka dots; she never wore polka dots at group therapy. Ten years ago, she didn’t have a journal. Now, she leaned over one and made quick short drawings and wrote patches of words.
    The Saskia of today wasn’t smiling. The Saskia Stiles of my memory smiled. Although the Saskia before me seemed so much like the Saskia in my memory, she was also strikingly different.
    At once, a new thread began in my mind: Why? Why is she different? Why isn’t she smiling?
    Why do these questions seem so important?
    I sat, silently, and absorbed her. She was the same, she was different.
    She wore no makeup, no jewellery.
    Her eyes were—
    She hadn’t looked at me, but I didn’t have to look at her to know how blue her eyes were. I remembered their colour from the last time I said goodbye to Saskia Stiles. Back then, she looked up at me from the table where she was writing a poem. Back then, she looked up at me and smiled, and I saw her eyes. The colour of blue ice, shed from a glacier and spilled into the bay.
    I’ve never forgotten.
    I don’t forget anything . I’m not supposed to.
    I finished eating and stood up.
    This is what I said to Saskia, the first words I said to her in ten years, the same words I said to her the last time I saw her: I said, “Goodbye, Saskia, I’ll see you later.”
    She didn’t reply. I saw the barest flicker of her eyes, the slightest lifting of her head. Like a flash of lightning, I saw the blue, then it was gone, and she was looking at her phone again.

THE POEM AS A BOOKEND
    Outside the cafeteria, I took out the balled-up piece of paper and unwrapped it.
    hello
    is there anybody in there
    I didn’t know if it was a good poem or not—I am not a poet. But I knew it was a short poem, and I think that reduced the probability it was bad.
    Ten years ago, she worked on a poem as I left, and I never knew what it was about, because it was unfinished when I put on my coat and left. Although she insisted on reading out every poem in a loud voice, she zealously guarded its secrets until it was complete.
    I said goodbye and that I would see her later. It wasn’t much, but she loved hearing those words from me, because she knew exactly how to reply. She treated it like an epiphany. Laying down her poem, she stood up and followed me to the door, then stopped, hopping up and down. Her hands opened and closed on either side of her head. My father always said that it looked like she was quoting herself.
    Ten years ago, she hopped up and down, her eyes wide, trembling, barely able to contain her excitement.