If Clouds Were Stones We Would Toss Them Through Windows in the Sky

I hadn't really thought about her in a while. If I did it was only in a passing, unintentional. It wasn't that I didn't care, it was just that there was nothing new to think about and the old thoughts were so worn thin that they disappeared. I felt good about that. It had run its course and it was over and done and I was fine. I was here or there and she was somewhere and that was fine.

But for one second, one night, I thought about calling. I said it out loud. "No," my friend said, "no way." So I didn't, and it was fine. I forgot about that moment, recalling it only late in the afternoon the next day. There were other things to think about. There was water boiling and pages to look at.

I met some friends the next day. I thought about the way they interacted, felt like a spectator in some twisted play and let myself be paralyzed in my chair. 'Cause they laughed with ease, see, and my head felt like a stone, so I didn't laugh lest my jacket crinkle, make noise and disturb them. I guess I wasn't part of that situation. I wondered if I had even been invited at all.

I went home and slept until 1:30. I ate a piece of toast. I went back to sleep.

When I woke up I thought about another girl, with blond hair. I imagined that I had an apartment with two bedrooms and a fireplace. Can apartments have fireplaces? I went on my laptop with the intention of emailing a friend a story detailing my feelings about being a spectator but I never got around to it. I send too many emails about things like that anyway. It felt like it had happened a long time ago and was therefore irrelevant.

The next week my friend came back from vacation and threw a house party. There were a lot of people there. I drank beer and walked around with a cement head. A group of people wanted to smoke up in the back but my friend said no. They did it anyway and she didn't find out. I watched them from the kitchen. I talked a lot of nonsense to everyone that night. I found myself sitting on the couch with a friend of a friend who talked about this really great movie he saw the other day. I told him somebody should make a movie of the book The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway because they wouldn't have to write a script because everything is right there. He told me he'd never read that book and my hands turned to marble. I should find somebody who's read that book, I thought.

She was at that party. I told her about my idea for The Sun Also Rises as a movie. She smiled and agreed and said she'd never read that book. I tried to float through the crowd but my legs were tied to the wooden floors.

When I got home instead of sleeping I wrote made up stories. I realized how easy it was and wrote a lot of words about imaginary events. I wondered what kind of person that made me. I remembered this guy I had met in a bar once. I had told him I was studying English Lit. He told me he was in Commerce. He said that meant that he was logical and that my head was in the clouds. My head wasn't in the clouds, it was a tree in the ground. I decided I would publish my words in a collection of stories and poems called If Clouds Were Stones: A Collection of Short Stories and Poems, but when I woke up the next morning I had forgotten all about it.

I went to the mall and sat still like a copper statue. People made wishes and threw pennies into the fountain. She made a wish, tossed my copper thoughts to the bottom of the pool.