I was visiting a friend in jail. He was behind bars and then there were bars behind him, not the brick wall you’d expect to see if it was a movie. “To let in the light,” said the warden, not sarcastically at all, and to be honest, there was a cheeriness to the place. My friend had put a vase with a small red flower on the small blue table next to his bed. The sheets were almost goldenrod. “We encourage decoration,” said the warden, also not sarcastically. My friend pulled out a red chair for me and I sat and the two of us talked, for a moment forgetting everything that had put him in there and focusing instead on everything that had happened before, and especially that one summer when we were both twenty-nine and he confessed his love for my sister and I reveled in the warmth of that circuit, knowing I’d have him close, knowing that would mean shared music, shared books, different loyalties in sports teams that would give us the same shared joy as we opposed one another every few days in a trivial but heartfelt manner. We stopped there. Air slid out of the room. We were back to the issue of his location. Too much remained to be said. The room had gone black and white and mostly gray.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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