Some days I go all day without remembering. I feel normal. I have forgotten us, forgotten you. I tac-tac-tac at the keyboard in my cubicle, humming along with the radio. I laugh half-heartedly at a Dilbert cartoon someone has slipped onto my desk. Planning corporate events, booking caterers, talking with PR; everything feels the same.

      But not today. Today is a bright spring day, and memories of you come roaring toward me on the heels of the new season.

      Sun warms my face as I walk west on Adams Street. For so long the city has groaned under the low-slung, gray winter sky. Now, it is bright and warm: the sun has returned, and though it’s only 60 or so degrees, it feels like 80 compared to the cold, damp misery of interminable winter. Women are excited and bare their shoulders and the backs of their thighs. Men’s heads swivel on their necks as they holler promises they can’t keep out open car windows.

      As I walk to the subway I feel sap rising in my limbs, tired and stiff from winter’s stillness. I want to shrug out of my blue wool coat and run down the street, airing myself out, like I’ve been packed away all winter long. I want to arch my back, to play and stretch under the hands of warm weather. The breeze’s touch is warm on my face; there is a promise in it, of growing things. Your touch made me feel just as light and free. You blew into my life like March, impulsive and boisterous. Your eyes sparkled with charm and interest; you gave kisses that were wet and fresh. Finally, after so much cold spring was here, you were here, and I would feel warm and perfect forever.

      At a stoplight I look back and see the monolithic facade of the museum above the buzzing traffic of Michigan Avenue; I think of last spring’s trip to the Art Institute. We stood in front of a Picasso, and while you spoke passionately of azure and phthalo and cerulean, I looked at you and hoped you saw me in as many facets. Rows of daffodils nodded their brass band heads at us as we walked outside. I threw back my head, laughing at something you said, and you reached out with an index finger and stroked my insolently bare collarbone.

      I remember the night we got caught in that storm. I dragged you on a walk through tree-lined Logan Square streets, and when the clouds blew in I wanted to run for it, but you grabbed my hand and held me still on a street corner. You took my face in your hands and looked at me with a hungry penetration that made me lower my eyes.

      “Your eyes are the color of mud,” you said, over the patter of raindrops on leaves and the hiss of passing taxis.

      “I’m getting all wet,” I said, suddenly shy. The way you looked at me made me shiver.

      “I know. You’re beautiful. Elemental; this is how you were always meant to look.” You wiped water from my forehead and cheeks, and watched as the rain ran down my face and dripped off my nose.

      You took me home. We peeled off sopping jeans and tee-shirts and set them tumbling in the dryer. Sarah Vaughn sang thickly through the speakers of your record player, and as I sat hunched in a sweatshirt on your couch, you poured me a drink I could not identify; it was amber colored, it tasted strong, and it untied like a warm silk knot in my empty stomach. You took my hand and we lie on the bed in your dark room. At first we were slow, like we hadn’t really decided to do what we were doing. Then you undressed me. You touched me, sticking your thumb in that tender, tasty, beautiful divot right inside my hipbone, and squeezed, testing my flesh like an avocado just now ripe. My vision blurred. There was rhythm, friction, the sound of our breathing, and the wet, heedless, fiery tingling that spread from between my legs through my body, slow and dark like spilled wine, and you whispered into my hair, “I love it when you make that sound,” a high shiny soft sound that tumbled out of me accidentally, a sound like worn sneakers on wet grass. I made it over and over until I came, shuddering like thunder, and collapsed beside you in a smiling funky heap.

      The stoplight is about to change; people are leaking into the intersection in anticipation. But I am glued to the concrete by your memory. I am tortured by the taste of you that floods my mouth with the tangy green bite of spring. Your laugh is in the wind, your hands are the hot breath on my legs as I walk across the subway grate; your shoulders are the shoulders of the man who stands in front of me, also waiting for the signal to cross the street, checking his watch. I reach out to touch him, already knowing it isn’t you, and when his stranger’s face looks expectantly into mine I stammer an apology and brush past him, hoping he isn’t watching me walk away thinking what an idiot I am. The whole train ride home I rumble past Grand, Chicago, Division, and Damen, jammed between a bored-looking businessman in a gray suit and a student with an IPod and a tube full of architecture plans sticking out of his bag. Neither of them notices me. My breath is shallow, a brick of anxiety weighing down my chest. I feel heavy and unready for spring. Your smeary fingerprints are still all over it and I do not know how to wipe them off, or even if I want to.

About the author:

Jessica Young has a degree in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. She graduates this spring with an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College. She’s been published in Hair Trigger 29 and 30, Warpland, the 2008 Story Week Reader, and in 2006 she received a fiction award from the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation of Chicago. Her creative nonfiction has been featured on Chicago Public Radio’s Eight Forty Eight. Jessica was an editor on the soon-to-be-released anthology, Open to Interpretation. She is currently completing a short story collection, is an adjunct professor at Columbia College, and lives in Chicago.