Kirsten Smith
She Got Away and Came Back
One day, I answer the
door and there she is,
the ghost of my husband’s
ex-girlfriend,
his
“one who got away”.
She’s
friendly enough, but she’s
been living in the Other World for so long
she’s
forgotten how to speak.
She can’t
say even the simplest of words, like carrot or tonsil.
One that seems to give her
extra trouble is goodbye.
I tell her Harry’s
at the office, but she comes in anyway,
showing me her pet rock and her
passport
stamped with Heaven and Hell,
Canada and Puerto Rico.
When she’s
finally able to talk, I take her to the mall.
At the Orange Julius, she tells
me
about the drawbacks of the
dating scene in Purgatory
and the unavailability of a
Starbucks in the Seventh Circle.
I tell her what it’s
like being married
and how sorry I am that she
died.
I tell her about losing my
mother to cancer,
how I met Harry in the grief
group,
how at first I thought he’d
never get over her.
How did he? she asks,
depressed but curious.
I tell her what the grief
counselor always said,
that grief is like hard candy;
you can only suck on it for so
long
before the flavor gives out
or the whole thing just melts
away.
When I ask her how long she’s
staying,
she says she doesn’t
know,
that no one ever does on trips
like these.
Back at the house, she excuses
herself for what seems like hours.
I go looking and find her face
down in my bed.
I thought I’d
hate you, she says, crying.
Me, too, I say, and lie
next to her.
Her hair is soft and strange
and it’s
all we can do just to lie there,
the afternoon sun splaying
through the blinds,
one of us face up and the other
face down,
unable to move a muscle for
anything
but the here and the now.
Kirsten Smith's
poems have appeared in such magazines as
The
Gettysburg Review,
Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review
and
Witness, and she has been the
recipient of fellowships from the Breadloaf Writer's Conference and The
MacDowell Colony. In addition, she co-wrote the feature films
10 Things I Hate About You and
Legally Blonde. |