The private schoolgirls kept coming through the turnstiles while I was waiting for you at the station. I must have seen flocks of ten or twenty navy skirts swish by — pleated lamp shades with legs for stands. I couldn’t tell them apart, and the only diversity marker amongst them was the occasional orange popsicle in one of their hands. All of them had flushed cheeks and their hair plastered to their foreheads because of the way summer makes things stick. My own clothes had become droopy in the heat, and I felt like a sagging clock in The Persistence of Memory. I was probably just another sweaty body in the conglomerate of exhaled breaths, but it was prettier to picture myself as a Dalí painting.

The promise was two sheets of folded paper tucked inside the front pocket of my father’s leather briefcase. My mother had let me carry it that day after I’d found it in the back of the closet where he kept his old shoes and Altoid tins — a collection that nobody dared raise an objection to in our house. I had written you poetry and you said you would come to see me at two o’clock by the newsstand in the train station. I never wore a watch so I wasn’t sure how late you were. The crowd was my only indicator of the passage of time. The dwindling schoolgirls let me know that it was nearing quarter past four, and I began to wonder whether your shoelaces had come undone and you had tripped and fallen really badly somewhere. I swallowed my concerns until the businessmen began making their way past the ticket collectors in herds. It was only then that I noticed my throat had gone completely dry.

You stumbled through the revolving doors some time after rush hour. You skipped your apologies and began describing the way your darling had thrown all of your possessions out of the window early this morning. How you had to pack them up in your blue suitcase and head over to the diner for cigarettes and coffee until she came to get you much later into the afternoon. You said that Julianne, the diner owner, served free pancakes to everyone who happened to be there when the two of you made up. You forgot the reason you came to see me, and we ate sandwiches at the deli outside. The paper in my briefcase grew heavier and heavier with every bite of egg salad that I chewed. When I picked it up to take it home once you had gone, it felt like a great lead weight sitting in the inside of the zippered pockets — sitting inside my stomach.