The Portal

On my way home tonight I stopped.

I have passed her for months and never done it, and tonight I stopped at the bench nearest the public bathrooms and said hello. Her name is Arlene.

I had a twenty in my pocket and I gave it to her, but I asked first whether it would help tonight. She said it would. It would buy a warm meal. Then I told her the thing I had been carrying the whole time I was writing about her without her knowing. I said I pass by here every day, and I have wondered if there was something she needed, something she was waiting on.

She said she was waiting for the portal to open.

Then she said, actually, we are all waiting for the portal to open.

© Andy Patrick at 11:01pm at Carpinteria Beach, CA

I have turned the sentence over since. I do not know what she meant, and I am not going to pretend the meaning resolved on the walk home. Part of me heard death in it, a person waiting at the edge of something, and the we that follows as a reminder that the edge is everyone’s. Part of me heard what a doctor would hear, and I know that the easy thing is to file the sentence under a diagnosis and stop listening to it, and I am trying not to take the easy thing. And part of me wondered whether she knows something I do not, whether the woman I had decided was the still point in a moving town is the one who has been facing the right direction all along.

I cannot choose among the three. Each one tells me more about myself than about Arlene. The first is my fear. The second is what I was trained to think. The third is what I want to be true, or what I feel guilty enough to hope is true. She said a thing, plainly, and I brought three different versions of myself to it and left with none of them confirmed. The portal is hers. I do not get to open it.

What I could do, I did. I told her that now, when I pass, I can say hello. She said yes. That would be nice.