The Hour

On the last day of that school year, our English teacher
told us that the theme of the hour was love lost. Judging
from the punctuated groans, you could tell that we wanted
none of that. She begins by drawing
a figure of a woman on the used board. This is
Anna on the tracks, she says, and tells us about fear and how the body
refuses it when it already recognizes when things are too late. She
erases that picture and replaces it with a stick figure and instructs
us to say hello to Humbert, who is chasing after a girl sporting
pigtails and the pigtails turn into white doves, their feathers
flattened under the weight of all that grief. Then comes Oliver
and that infamous line: Love is
never having to say you are sorry. Finally,
we catch on and one of us, a girl in a red skirt,
raises her hand and asks,
Why is the objective of love loss? The teacher
looks out the window; we see the
years falling away from her face, she has never
looked any younger than this. Then a year passes and she says
Because all we want is to want. Anything more
than that is a lie; anything less
lies to waste. She shields her eyes and she pulls down the blinds. It's
a wonder to me even now, how we managed
to sit there, looking at each other
illuminated in that new darkness, hoping
that the final bell would ring
soon enough. And when it did, our bodies rushed out,
leaving the longest hour of our lives in that dark room
with her.