Richter

In the hotel room, I took a video of a lamp that hung and shone warm light down and over a corner table. I couldn’t feel any wind and had the windows closed but it swayed slowly as though a small scale earthquake was locally epicentric in the very room I was in.

“If I booked a night in a hotel, just me, one of these nights, and I happened to text you to come over, would you?” I had said to you. And I could think of other more perfect places I couldn’t afford than that honestly shitty hotel, maybe to try to impress you or maybe to pad what I lacked in personality with my purchasing power — general items from my douchebaggery I would sometimes employ to hide how small I felt.

Yet later that night you made me feel tall by saying yes. Funny how three letters arranged just the right way could hold so much power. Two would have held the same, and I would be writing an entirely different story.

That night was more than seven years ago. And if I could travel back in time — even as I have only said to you yesterday how I would have loved to see the dinosaurs in person — it would be that night that would hold a higher position in my theoretical space-time itinerary. Maybe look at that lamp that wouldn’t stop swaying again. Get distracted by just how the fuck it was. Or clean up the empty beer cans we have stacked right below it. Or maybe to finally just look at us in bed sleeping or trying to, you in my arms near my chest and wonder whether I have figured it out already and if by then you felt it, too — the small scale earthquake epicentric straight right in my chest. The one that has swayed me ever since.