long warm spanish nights

David never planned to grow out of Hemingway dreams. Short sentences and a young man’s idea of the future as a long warm Spanish night. So it didn’t matter that he wasn’t noticed in that moment or that he may have been the melodramatic nightmare he suspected his parents believed him to be. He sat alone with an empty notebook at the lunch table. It was loud all around him and he hated them for how much noise they made, but he still wished somebody would come. It was the wishing that distracted him more than the noise. He thought of Rebecca who said she liked that he was shy. He ruminated on that for weeks, mistakenly trying to expound on the quality by withdrawing further and smiling even less. At lunch, he would look up and most often she wouldn’t be there. He imagined that when she finally would be, it might impress her if she saw him writing. There was also the superstition that she might appear if he stopped paying attention. After half a page of filler and scribble, he wrote:

“I couldn’t have been made for anything but this even if just the sensation of pencil in hand is like a pacifier for my baby soft soul. It’s how I fall in love with a perfect stranger whose every blank I fill in with the fairy dust and hot glue of my imagination. The rest of the work is done by the mole at the top of her left cheek and the tickle of her hair brushing up on my shoulder and her breath on my neck when she leans over to whisper a question.

I take this feeling home and think of all the words that make it mean something as I fall deeper and feel sicker for it and feel good for loving something so much it makes me feel sick because I don’t know anyone else who can say the same for themselves. It then occurs to me that maybe it’s not writing, reading, or love, but feeling, and these are all just different means to that one end, but what better means could someone ask for? I don’t think I’d hear her voice the same way if it were football or calculus.”

He’d forgotten to look up by then. It seemed to have quieted around him. There was a dent in the callus on his middle finger he’d had since he was 5 and first learned to hold a pencil. He thought of Hemingway having the same callus and the same bone deep primordial need to feel and to share the feeling. This and the breeze on his neck made the idea of warm Spanish nights and all the other places he hadn’t been, all the people he hadn’t met and things he hadn’t written, seem much more real. Like an animal walking from the womb, he turned the page and kept writing.