dig her

I liked the way she sat with one hand in her pants while we watched television in the afternoons. It just rested there, it wasn’t sexual, it wasn’t doing anything other than being really comfortable. And when I left I thought about her like that. I liked the way she got around without me. I liked thinking about her being alone almost as much as I liked being with her. I think that was part of it in those first few months I spent away from her. She didn’t need me. She didn’t need me the way I needed to be needed, and I got to really digging that about her. Sometimes days would pass and I’d wonder if she’d gotten along to being someone else, being with someone else. But it didn’t matter. She told me once, you can’t keep people. In fact, I sat across the table from her while she wrote an entire essay about that idea, that feeling, that fleeting fleetingness. She called it, the impossibility of forever. I remember that week more than the rest because that’s how I got the images of her alone stuck in my mind. While she worked it didn’t matter if I sat there or if I fried eggs or if I went for a run, or anything. While she worked, she was already always alone anyways. And like I said, I dig that about her, or I dug that about her. Being with her or not being with her seems to distort and negate any constant use of verb tense. For me she exists simultaneously in the past and the present, she is the imperfect tense.