WHERE YOU ARE

Five or so hours from now
my uncle, seated next to his ex-wife of twenty-odd years, will almost ask me, in his way, just how long I intend to wait before I bring someone special to meet him.

Now
halfway between the farm and home, I am stuck in a small town’s annual traffic jam, behind a parade of teenage would-be kings and queens who wave and smile from their perches at the tops of back seats of convertibles, preening down main street in Colon, Michigan, at five miles per hour.

In eight months
I will blow straight through this town without stopping, and it will be spring, and I will be distracted, my heart so recently broken by a girl I can’t even imagine right

now
trapped at the back of a parade. I wait, and wonder how many times I’ve failed to look up at the right moment, boarded the wrong train, chosen the wrong school, driven past you but been looking at the wrong side of the road, away from you and toward loneliness.

In twenty-six or so hours
I will be driving too fast on a dark country road and run over a possum’s tail.

In four years and nine months
I will marry you, and we will be happy.

In five hours
I will meet the woman who broke my uncle’s heart. They will sit next to each other, and smile at me in a way that is beyond happiness, beyond sad knowingness of life, beyond the wisdom that comes with age; beyond my understanding. I will wonder which of them called the other first, to begin the reconciliation.

But here, and now
the parade does not abate, as if smiling is always the same thing as happiness. And today, it is. And here, in Colon, any of them could be king or queen; I'll be gone before they know, before the smiles of this moment give way to wisdom and time.