I Miss You: A Story in 500 Words

During time spent on lock down in the 2020 coronavirus outbreak, I produced a series of character studies, short shorts, poems, and vignettes in 500 or fewer words. Enjoy!

I stand in front of the house, the sun warm on my shoulders. It didn’t look like a special house. It looked like every other house on the block. Three concrete steps lead up to a small porch and the front door. Someone had painted that door red but long ago. The paint had cracked and faded.

I don’t remember the door being red. I also don’t remember the four square windows set high, near the top of the frame. Maybe a different door? The door I remember had been varnished wood with an oval window. But maybe that is the back door.

The house feels special to me. I’d come here unerringly, parking on the curb without a doubt in front of the third house on the north side of the street. It was the house of before.

I remember my younger self storming down those steps and down the walk, through where I now stand motionless. That self slammed the door on a yellow ’68 VW Beetle and tore out fast enough to squeal the tires on the little car. That self had not known that I would never cross that threshold again. That self had been innocent of the way the world can hurt. That self had only bled from childhood scrapes. Never at the hands of another person. That self had never held a gun.

Something rolls under my shoe and I look down to see a fragment of sidewalk chalk, bright blue. I bend over and pick it up, feeling the dry dust on my fingers. I remember drawing for hours with chalk, until I’d worn all the pieces down to nubs. That’s a before memory. The after self no longer drew. The after self  doesn’t do much of anything other than drift from menial job to meaningless job. That’s why I’m here: to see if I can find my before self. Maybe re-become them.

I step onto the brown grass crumbling in the yard next to the stoop. Kneeling, I write “I Miss You” in tall, blue letters on the side of the concrete steps facing the street. I miss them so much: that willful, creative, beautiful person. The me who is no longer me.

The world had tried to force be into a person, a body, a gender that didn’t fit. Humans so love boxes, categories, labels, binaries. I’d tried to conform, to be a girl, to be feminine.

My mother had called me a freak; she’d always been so much crueler than my father. That had been when I’d fled. But streets are so hard, even more so to a person who doesn’t fit, who doesn’t belong. The body kneeling in the dead grass bore scars both visible and invisible. The hand blue with chalk dust had struck, twisted, killed.

I stand abruptly. I’m not here. I don’t exist.

I turn and walk back toward my car. It isn’t a Bug anymore. It is a BMW M6 Gran Coupe in black sapphire.