These United States By Cristin OKeefe Aptowicz We met in Providence, Rhode Island. Our country’s smallest state. Its motto is just one word: Hope. At first, you lived in Chicago, where I’d visit and eat breakfast out of a cast iron skillet every morning, and I lived in New York City, where you’d eventually move three weeks after the towers were knocked down. New York City was our base for eight years, where the dotted lines of our travels originated and where they ended: Austin, where our friends bribed us with beer and queso; Charlotte, where the BBQ was so good, we high-fived each other, our mouths too full to form words; New Orleans, where our friends married the day after you ate your first crawdaddy; San Francisco, where we slept in a room with an iguana and ate cheap burritos fat as puppies; Columbus, where your brother lives; Florida, where your parents live; LA, where we sat next to the hot tub our friends were in because it never occurred to us to pack swimsuits in the winter. In between it all, we lived Astoria, Queens, sleeping on a bed a friend of a friend was just going to throw out anyway, commuting forty-five minutes on the subway each direction just so that we’d have an excuse not to see anyone else on the weekends. This is where we spent the earliest years of us, where we built our first small home, crammed it with all that laughter. When we finally left, our friends threw us a party and we smashed piñatas shaped like Death Stars. Almost nine years earlier to the day, on a Greyhound bus we rode through Canada, we saw a entire flock of shooting stars through the scratched plexiglass windows and we made wishes. We were so new back then. We couldn’t see the mountains. We could only see the darkness where they blocked out the sky. TWO DAYS!
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 22:39:20 +0000
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