Where

Randy closed his eyes for just a second and she was gone.

That's how it felt anyway.

When he thought about her now he thought about her as an abstraction. A big mess of hair on top of a pale, round face. He thought about her lips on his.

He rode his bike around the outskirts of their shared small town to forget about her but it wasn't enough distance from her memory.

Then one night he found it. He thought he would never even think about it again much less find it. But there it was, staring back at him from the bottom of a tattered box in his garage. It was a video tape. It was simply labeled with a red x but he knew what it really held.

It was a tape of him and her together. They must have only been 18 or 19 in it. He was a virile strapping young man in those days, not the bloated sack he had become. He watched the tape in his living room on mute. He needed to adjust to the nostalgia slowly. He watched the shaky, grainy footage of her dancing on top of a copper colored boulder. She wore an over-sized sweatshirt with the California raisins on it. Her hair was in a ponytail. She looked right into the camera, right at Randy and said something that seemed like "I love you". Randy shut off the tape and made yet another dinner for himself. He broke a heel of bread in half and buttered it before he caught himself thinking about the past again. He thought about Thailand or Vietnam in the Summer and if it would be far enough away to feel like himself again if he went there. He remembered that she always loved Thai food and decided on Russia maybe. Russia seemed like a place he could get lost in.

That night as he tried to sleep and dream of Russia he remembered that on that videotape was a part where they made love and debated if he wanted to watch it or not. He looked over at his alarm clock. 4 AM. He wondered what time it was in Russia and sighed.