He had a lot to show me. Messy hair and
pale skin and the money to afford a better
education than I could. I was just visiting those
ivy-encrusted towers. He lived there. Mark picked me up on the corner one afternoon when I was
waiting for the bus. A brief pit stop at
Wegmans.
Sushi and
Fresh Samantha. He loved them both. I'd never tried either. My dad's fear of germs had long kept us away from sushi, and his fear of spending
money made Fresh Samantha a stupid, stupid endeavor.
I'd been hiding behind
my father's walls so long I barely knew what walls even were.
Mark was
rich. Mark was rich and he didn't know it. Mark was the kind of guy who talked about how cool it would be to be
poor, and he
knew. He knew because he'd loved the simple life, eating
rice out of
wooden bowls around a fire that summer he spent in
Africa. Mark wore the best clothes and lived in the best
apartment, and while he was trying to win me over he swore he had lived it poor when he was little, before the
divorce, and his current extravagance was only a response to the way he'd lived before.
When he was trying to hurt me he told about his stashes and stashes of cold, powerful money, and he showed me what I didn't have, that I didn't know.
I had something to show him too, though. And much like everyone before and after him, it left him only sadder.
I seem to crumble everybody I touch. Mark's money left his pockets full but left everything else strangely empty. He smoked
pot all the time, every day, and pretended he cared about his work and sought more degrees and Masters' than ever could do him good. Eventually he disappeared off into the
mountains, to try and find out what he'd
lost.
I see Mark in his
flannel pajamas inside his doorway, looking at me from the light that shone from his room and into my
darkness. I remember being stoned for the first time ever, and trying to explain to him I was in love with somebody else. I remember
losing him that way.
I brought my old
boyfriend to Wegmans and bought him sushi and Fresh Samantha two months later and wondered why no other
beverage would do.
I went to
Wegmans tonight and bought them for myself, and thought a lot about it. I'd gone
vegetarian since I knew Mark. I found something that didn't have fish in it but was more than just rolls of
cucumber. I found a
Fresh Samantha I'd never tried and ate them both at home, wondering what I'd learned, and how I might be
richer than I knew. And so might he.