Across from the courthouse, there was an old movie theater which played the kinds of films that college kids who travel abroad to Paris might see. They, and me; a taste of urbanity that I could only find almost an hour from my driveway, and the closest to urbanity it came was a Coldstone creamery adjacent to some art films that took place in Manhattan. That’s the same Coldstone where my old college friend Lara worked in our summers away from campus.
The autumn my dad was dying, she broke her back in three places during a terrible skiing accident. She used to give me rides to college, and I would sleep in the back of her car. She introduced me to Aphex Twin’s Ambient Works ‘85-92 one summer night in a Brooklyn apartment. I slept in her bed and she asked to hold me, but I was too intimidated to embrace her back, as ‘Tha’ bled through the cracked door to another room.
Now, all I think about when I pass that Coldstone on the way to the old movie theater is Lara’s shattered bones, and if she’ll be ok after she’s healed. And when I hear ‘Tha’, and ‘Pulsewidth’, and ‘Green Calx’, I wonder if anyone will be able hold her the way she held me, without pain or insecurity from a body that doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to anymore, ever again.