Sometimes I’ll get a sentence in my head that I want to write down. And then another thought. The following sentence. And then one more sentence,  until it’s becoming a story, or a poem. Sometimes a song. Then I repeat it in my head. Repeat it so I won’t forget it until I can write it down. But I don’t write it down. And then I lose it. In the ether of my brain.

My favourite is the first sentence. Its always a statement. The opener. The introduction in one sentence. A welcome. It’s like a poignant lyric in your favourite song. The one that constantly replays because it just connects with you. You and one sentence. One statement.

Last Friday night I was with N. She was driving us home. She managed, who knows how, to get our parking ticket stuck in the machine. The ticket went in, missed the teeth of the feeder and kind of slipped in between the plastic outer covering of the ticket machine and the inner metal box. I was at the car waiting for her and after 5 minutes she yelled “the tickets stuck!”. Me being me, I jumped at the opportunity to solve the issue. Me also being me, I held up the line fully absorbed in the mission of ticket rescue. Equipped with a hairpin I had bent at two different angles on each side, I successfully retrieved the rogue ticket. Mission complete!

After letting the guy who was waiting so patiently behind us pay first, we exited the parking building. N told me later this man, while waiting for us, looked at his phone. N noticed his background cover was of a blonde woman, and not of the brunette woman he was with. “What brunette woman?” I asked N. I never noticed her in between my slight inebriation and my fully focussed ticket retrieval. “Oh, she was hiding behind a pole. I didn’t even know they were together until he turned and spoke to her”.  I shook my head. N agreed. Although I wasn’t shaking my head at his infidelity. I was shaking my head at my lack of observation. I was also shaking my head at the fact that she was standing – well, actually in fact – hiding, behind a pole. That’s not strange at all.

On the way home I proceeded to talk a bit about a certain defining situation I went through in my late teens. She reminded me about it when we met again next for lunch. “It was good that you got that off your chest”, she said. I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like I was confessing anything. Just telling her another story about some thing. I usually tell N stories of things I’ve heard or read about. She’s a good listening audience. So when she said this I kind of shrugged it off. I said, “Well, I wasn’t hiding it. Just sharing it”. I perhaps should have just said, thanks for listening.

An old blog post dated 15 Dec, 2014 found in drafts.