I remember it happened once years ago in the most mundane way - what do they call it? that thing, when you remember about love? no, not that love and yes that love just, Love. and then everything is not easy or even better but it can be, somehow okay. I’d just dropped a woman off for the last time at the airport, getting lost on the way to a place I’d already traveled to many times, as though to make time slower and risk her departure at all. we’d spent years loving and years unraveling each other and in a way, the whole world foot by foot. and when only 100 feet away she was already as far as 8,925 miles, and not only her but whatever sum of our equation we’d once imagined making of ourselves or maybe, and maybe it was the problem - that thing we do, of each other. we let that all go once and for all not knowing what else we’d each grab onto. I remember the horizontal escalator which I never understood but sometimes took, anyway and a lonely swan song of saxophone in the depths of the long, long basement and tears in a bathroom stall. I remember a night out when I was barely there, if at all. I remember, and this is what happened, this is why I’m writing, stopping in the local shopping mall at the AT&T store the next day as I was driving back to get a phone contract. because, though one cord had been cut, I’d need another one. The woman that worked there, with wrinkles drawn through every kind of time on her face but still young, only tired, attended one by one to the people that waited on the other side of the circular wooden counter with all their demands. as the glasses slid down her nose, one man spoke very loudly that he could not hear the messages on his phone. and I remember - she didn’t attend to the broken phone, she attended to the man. and asked to listen to his messages and as she did, she said them aloud, very loudly, and wrote down the details. one message was from the doctor about a prescription to alleviate some kind of pain. and she didn’t just listen and tell him the messages or rather, tell us all, really - that was the truth of it. no she said, well that’s confusing, isn’t it? and she pushed the number to reply and she gave the doctor her two cents on leaving such a complicated message on the phone of an old man, a stranger really, who needed medicine and couldn’t hear that well. then, moving on, she told the man he had a second call from his son - your son loves you, she said your son loves you, she said, louder because maybe, that day he hadn’t been able to hear that, either. I left the AT&T store, with more than I’d went in there for. I’ve too been the woman getting on the plane being 100 feet away and as far as 8,316 miles already. sometimes, life is like that both behind and ahead of us, what we know and don’t, behind and ahead of us, and woven in loops. I often see her, that woman from the AT&T store, if I’m paying enough attention, or rather, I see what she reminded me of. in the swirling leaves in the wind itself in the old, worn eyes who smile at me because of no greater reason than the matter of heart and teeth. exactly like that woman in the AT&T store listening to messages and more and passing them on, lines crossing every kind of time. (Aimee Hansen)