"Closer Than They Appear" by Cary Rainey

Danny walked into my life one day in my junior year of college, and he was tall and he was beautiful and he had curly blonde hair and blue eyes and this amazing smile that made me melt inside.  I was standing in line in a convenience store near campus when he and another boy came into the store.  They were talking and laughing and they came in and went straight to the back of the store.  I watched them a little bit out of the corner of my eye and I remember I started wishing as hard as I could that God would ignore my previous prayer from only a couple of seconds before and would, instead, make the line start moving slower.  That didn’t happen, though.  I didn’t see Danny again until he and the other boy came out of the store, the other boy now carrying two half-cases of beer, and they got into a little grey foreign car I learned later was Danny’s brother’s.  I followed him in my own foreign car to a house a few miles up in the hills and as I eased past the house, watching Danny and his friend disappear in my rearview mirror, I knew it had happened.  I knew I had just met the one guy, the right guy, and that we were meant to be together.  The thought filled me up inside.  I took a deep breath and I just drove.  Later, I couldn’t remember where I had been driving or for how long.  The next thing I knew, I was in my dorm room, lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling and planning our next encounter.

The snow is sporadic, but insistent, like it’s saying, “I’m weak, I know.  I can’t do much, but I’m here and I’m not going away just yet.”  The problem with that, with the snow being weak and sporadic, is that it makes people too confident and they forget about the ice, the black ice, the invisible ice that comes with Alabama snow and covers bridges and overpasses and low-lying roads already wet from the rain that came before the temperature dropped.  This is what I’m thinking about as I steady my right foot on the accelerator.  Easy does it.  Once I’m across, then I can lay down on it, but right now all I need to do is keep it slow and steady.  That’s what I’m thinking as I glance quickly to my right at the beaten, rusty guardrail.  Beyond the rail, I can see the top of an eighteen-wheeler emerging from beneath the overpass, headed south on Highway 31.  I make the conscious decision to concentrate on my speed and as I peer through the snowflakes falling and melting on my windshield, I try to let go of my memories, and I do, I let them go, but I have this new feeling roiling around in their place, this vague nagging suspicion that maybe I’m not quite fully awake or something, that maybe I need to pinch myself because not all of those memories, I realize with a strong sense of confusion, actually happened.  I still have the whole freaking overpass to cross and it’s like time is standing still and I shoot a glance into the rearview mirror, but I can’t see Melanie.  I can’t remember how long she’s been asleep or if she’s even been awake this morning.  She’s such a good girl.  She’s never angry and she never cries, or if she does cry, it’s only when she needs her diaper changed and once that’s taken care of, she’s fine.  She sleeps the whole night through and she takes a nap every day and whenever I wake her up, if she doesn’t smile and laugh, she at least doesn’t cry or act out.  She probably didn’t wake up this morning when I was putting her in the car, now that I think about it.  There have been plenty of times she’s fallen asleep in the living room or on my bed and I’ve picked her up and carried her to her bed and she hasn’t stirred at all and so, yeah, that’s what I’m thinking happened this morning, which is fine.  Let the poor baby sleep and dream whatever dreams it is babies have: dreams of breasts or pacifiers or returning to the womb, maybe. 

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