side eye

I DO REMEMBER something of it. We were at the music festival, and my wife was sharing a blanket by the castle ruins with a strange woman. As I got closer, I could see it was Dulcinea. Upon watching me approach, her muscles stiffened, and she gave me what is known as the side eye. Several side eyes. My wife got up and left at this point, stretched in the sun, and said, “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.”

It took Dulcinea a great amount of self-control to slowly turn her head in my direction and speak to me. She looked older, and her voice was different. She was wearing red nail varnish, which seemed out of place. She had been a free-spirited hippie girl. When did she go all corporate woman on me? Alas, that’s what happens to people. They change over time. She looked tired and worn out though. She did speak. We were able to have some kind of conversation. I apologized once again for having liked her so much. The love letters, the entirety of the predicament. The whole thing had been too much for any normal lady to bear. What young woman at the start of her young life needed the love an older, washed up man?

That was the first day of the folk festival. On the second day, I was in Italy, where I had booked an Airbnb. My daughter came along. I remember when we walked into that hilltop house in the hills around Bari. “From here,” the owner said, “you can get direct access to the highway and drive to any place in Italy.” The apartment was strange. There was a bedroom with a loft, but these looked like they belonged more to a doll house. I was afraid that if I crawled up into that loft the whole Barbie Dream House looking thing would collapse. There was also an Estonian journalist there who wanted to interview me at a nearby café. Her invitations were relentless.

I left my daughter alone in the Dream House and did the interview, but she wanted to make Instagram videos too teasing the interview. All of that time my phone was ringing with some urgency as my daughter asked where I was. She wanted to go back to the folk festival. I wondered how my wife and Dulcinea were getting along. I felt guilty, as if I had only brought limitless dark clouds into their otherwise sunny existences. Back in Italy, the journalist still wouldn’t let me go. Wouldn’t I make her pasta too? We were supposed to drink wine! At last, I got fed up with the whole thing and ran back to the hilltop house. My daughter was already waiting by the car, fuming. “Where were you?!” she stomped. It was misty and raining. “Come on, kid,” I said, jogging over to the driver’s side door. “Let’s just get the hell out of this place.”