For Lori With Love And Applecores

Every day I walk to work and back. One point three miles there. One point three miles back.

I measure the miles in music. (Seven songs of normal length, three point five Broken Social Scenes or a whole spin through Best of the Lemonheads.)

One point three miles is a marathon in the morning. Stepping out on the meaner side of nine, my lungs seem smaller, neater, stuck together like two slices of stretch and seal. Of course my feet are a liability. I leave them behind me; one foot keeping time beneath the breakfast table, the second folded under my pillow with last night’s pajamas.

Every evening I wear a hat and eat an apple. It takes one point five songs to eat an average sized apple and another point five of a song carrying the core, before I arrive at the only rubbish bin on the Ballymoney Road.

Conveniently located between the People’s Park and the County Primary, this rubbish bin has eaten twenty three of my apples already this month. Using the calculator we keep under the counter at work, I have calculated a further one hundred and thirty odd apples before I can go home.

“What if they didn’t empty this bin?” I think one evening, “What if this bin just kept on eating my apples every day ‘til early August? What if, by Easter, a small mountain of apple cores- comparable to Slemish, or Tabor for those caught short of the Atlantic divide- has begun to edge it’s way towards the Park gate? What if there were apple trees growing from the pavement and small birds circling overhead, the smell of cider wafting all along the Ballymoney road? Wouldn’t it be brilliant? Wouldn’t it be a kind of blessed Jesus thing?” And for some reason it’s the sort of thought we both might think so this bin begins to remind me of you.

Every morning now and stronger in the evenings, I think of you when I pass the rubbish bin.

I’m sorry you’re not a fountain or even a post box. I’m sorry you smell like soda pop cans and juice boxes fermenting in the sun. And each time a parent- waiting for their red-headed offspring to come running from the school bell- stubs their cigarette on your head, it damn near breaks my heart.

Rest assured I think nothing but nice things when I look at this bin.

I think, “Gosh that girl could pass for French, especially in her apartment, the underground one with the sink and the keyboard perched on a dresser drawer.”

I think, “Elvis Costello is the king of the road and his best song by far is Alison.” I think you’ll probably agree. I hum a few bars as proof but it never sounds quite as wonderful outside your car.

I think, “That girl’s a black and white movie when she wears the fifties sundress.”

Last of all, late at night, I think, “When she speaks it’s like someone has taken the time to knit me a sweater; a nice sweater done by hand with honesty and a whole year of fragile thoughts bound into every stitch. And each time I go to the closet and choose this sweater over all my new sweaters- fashionable sweaters from the Red Light and expensive sweaters bought with Grandmother’s Christmas money- each time I chose her sweater, I never regret it. In fact, I feel a whole day younger than yesterday.”

These are things I think by your bin. Also I think about the things we’ll say ten months from now when you are no longer a bin or a mountain of sprouting apple cores but rather a full grown, window of a girl, waiting by the Burnside bridge.

I will not need to say, “Lord, I missed you most on Friday nights,” or “thank you a million thanks for the postcards and the shoes, the empty packets of Junior Mints and the plastic pony whom I have christened Sam Adams and carry with me daily, hoping we might one day ride into something approaching an adventure.” Oh no, we will say nothing which cannot be spelt in Scrabble tiles and then we will drink gin and tonics in short glasses and never mention the missing again.

Jan Carson