Earrings

First outings (not a date exactly) someone you’re impressed with. You trot out your best anecdotes and venture small confidences. You have to decide which “you” to show - the serious-seeming student, the ditz, the pianist, the Tom Brady fan, the writer. He does an impression of Tom Hanks that was very good and very funny. “It could have been worse,” I said, but he knew what I meant. “It’s my party trick,” he said. I thought of a long ago prom after-party - a guy removing my pierced earrings with his tongue which sent chills up my spine and then grinning with pearls in his lips. We’re here, in the new, the now but we’re married to memories.