Waist Deep

10

The cold in the park felt good, but the stiffening in my joints from sitting outside finally forced me to head home.

Inside my tiny apartment, I sat at the kitchen table and meticulously wrote out everything that Matt had told me about Kris Sinderling.I wrote questions in the margins to the left of my list of facts.

Why’d she pull away from her friends?

Why’d she run away?

Is there a boyfriend?

I studied the list and my questions, then pushed away the pad of paper.I went to the bathroom and took some aspirin, then spent the rest of the day staring at that pad of paper.I stared and I wished for a crisp new manila folder to neatly store the notes.I stared at the paper and at Kris’s glamour photo that Matt had let me keep and then back at my handwriting.I stared so long that ghosts abandoned their hiding places from behind the curves and strokes of my pen and emerged, fingers pointing, pointing, pointing.

That night I slept.

A little.

And dreamt.