On this date many years ago, a Saturday, it was, I flickered into consciousness from sleep as—ah, Nabokov described it in a similar context in Ada—“the tiger of happiness fairly leaped into being.” I woke up, entwined and ungarbed, with a young woman whom I’d been stalking (as she would likely put it today) for over a quarter of my young life. I don’t think that the morning assembly of reality has ever rocketed up such a vertical gradient of joy, and I’m astonished looking back that my nose didn’t bleed. It all ended badly about a dozen years later, and while I don’t hold any truck with astrology (we Leos aren’t that credulous), I have to scratch my head at the thought that this radiant morning was also G.W. Bush’s twenty-eighth birthday. Clearly doom and grief were in the air, all unnoticed then...
I long ago understood that not all of my fellows maintained the equivalent of my conscientious internal calendar. I'd get amused responses in high school upon innocently observing “You know, it’s just two years ago today that...” I'm going to guess that the young woman in my account, for all the intense history we shared for a dozen years after that morning, has not summoned forth the event on this distant anniversary.
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