Marginalia

At the back of a paperback pulled off the shelf, I find a few fragments of marginalia jotted years before. I have no recollection of writing these lines. Notes toward a short story? He asked her to meet him in a strange city, at such and such a hotel, on the last Saturday of August. She hadn’t promised she’d come. But, if she did, he was sure it meant that everything they’d shared-—all the unspoken glances and sparks between them—- would bloom at the designated moment she walked into the hotel lobby. Is this an attempt at fiction or simply wish fulfillment? Have I been leading a double life? Either way: how strange to find this shadow version of myself, no longer alive, sloughed off like a coat of snow. And then, on the back page: They’d done all they could to salvage it; there was nothing left but to untangle their libraries.