Time

Albert Einstein once said: When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.

He's right. True relativity happens in the brain. Here we are in Spring again. It seems like just a few weeks ago I moved to Boston but it's almost been a year. Today also happens to be the year-and-a-half anniversary. That seems as if were ages ago and yet, talking about it the other night with L, I went back there in my memory and it could have been last week. Strange.

In the end, time may be just another trick of memory, that irascible beast.

I went to bed with a headache, I woke up with it this morning, now coffee and tylenol are hard at work combating it.

I replied to an e-mail is Spanish dredged up from what's left of high school in my brain to a five-year-old in Buenos Aires who has the same name as me.

The sun and the crisp air transport me back to Oberlin, those first few warm days when we'd walk in the Arb, write our chorales for theory sitting by the pond, skip practicing in order to eat ice-cream or read in Tappan square.

When it gets even warmer, I'm sure I'll remember that last summer, when every day was better than any she remembered, when the colors were brighter, the tastes more sumptuous, love more deeply felt than ever before. We cried then, said the things you think but never say, asked the questions you don't dare to ask, smiled at each other because we could, because we had secrets, because we were in love.