How Are You

The formality of it stings. “How are you?” Delivered with a self-conscious courtesy and a poverty of emotion calculated to immediately keep me at arm’s length, fencing herself in. There was a time when this same greeting would have been prefixed with a velvet-soft “hey” and saturated with a low hum of closeness that instantly muted the world around us, drawing me inside the fence with her, accompanied by a slackening of features and posture, as if the short separations demanded by work and other humdrum inconveniences of daily life were reluctant journeys, and home was wherever I happened to be. The piano player in a corner of the bar, as if sensing the intrusion of something buried into the world of the living, the chance encounter of present with its past, is now, with a mischievous glint in his eye, playing the kind of slow, tinkling jazz tune that, echoing from many nights past, is freighted with a desolation of angels. We're talking like fugitives fleeing our own shadows, the plastic pleasantries we exchange a cover-up, every word the coded equivalent of “don’t go there”, slow dancing without touching. Too soon, or too late, we decide it’s time to put an end to the past-present, like two estranged parents enforcing an early curfew on former versions of themselves. While we're walking away from each other, the piano notes waft like wayward stars through the door of the bar, trailing two ghosts who are, behind our backs, eloping into the night.