Storytime

It occurred to me, as I sat on the bed with a glass of wine, that he was probably at the wedding about now. I imagined him making small talk, wearing a shirt and tie somewhat uncomfortably. I imagined the girlfriend had made him leave his Blackberry behind and that he kept touching his pocket reflexively, wanting to check it. He is smiling wearily as he's introduced to one person after another, maybe happy when he can commiserate with another guy about baseball.

I closed my eyes and imagined that he wished he were somewhere else, barely able to keep up the facade. Maybe he thought about me - just for a second - touching his pocket where his Blackberry would be. He probably wears the tie well, despite what he thinks. Maybe there are questions about when he's going to marry the girlfriend. They've been together a while now, after all. He thinks about how life seems to be happening to him, a tide that's sweeping him along quite without his realizing it.

None of this is true, of course. This is my version of him, the version that I've created to fill in the gaps. I sit in my empty apartment, nursing my glass of wine, and imagine him at the wedding. It gives me some solace, some part of him that I can understand, even if it's inaccurate. What is real is me, sitting on the bed, looking mournfully at my own Blackberry whose flashing red light has begun to rule my life. It's sort of romantic, is it not, the idea that he and I were in the same time zone, that he was thinking of me just as I was thinking of him. Romantic indeed. And entirely a fiction.

I take comfort in thinking of life as a series of stories. It affords me a measure of control. I can have a hand in crafting the details that go unspoken. It gives me a way to possess a part of things that would be otherwise beyond my grasp. So I imagine him at this wedding - further details of which I have not - and I smile to myself, feeling gratified that I can have an imaginary version of him to call mine. I have little hope of ever getting that close to the real one. That's the gap that stories can bridge. Maybe it's a leftover tendency from being an only child, this propensity to create fiction in the spaces of the real. If nothing else, it seems to serve me well enough in the moment. It makes me feel less alone.

This is all very melancholy. Some stories are like that. As long as I think of myself as the protagonist - the one character in the story who is expected to experience change - then I guess all is well. It's a comedy, I keep telling myself. So maybe it will all work out, in a way that I least expect. Isn't that how stories usually go?