Amy in Opening Lines

Michael Palmer

We started dating by default, not knowing what else to do after sleeping together in the van at the base of the mountain. I don’t know the first time I called Amy my girlfriend. I called her honey first.

Driving to Vegas, Amy wound through the canyoned corner of Northwest Arizona at eighty miles per hour while looking for some kind of symbolic rock. I had a camcorder and was filming this. During the famous descent into the Vegas lights, I turned the camera onto her instead. She looked calm.

I went from never having a girlfriend to being in a serious relationship, and what struck me was how easy it was. Everybody talked about the sacrifice and the challenge, but there was nothing to it. I felt superior to other couples, who all struck me as dreary and passionless, the men preferring to spend time with their friends. Some of it took practice, but most of it came naturally enough that I felt gifted.

We were young and had nothing. It wouldn’t be accurate to say we were poor. If one of us had gotten sick, our parents would have paid the hospital bills or died trying. We didn’t have kids of our own to support. We had food and pot and alcohol and sometimes a car. A mattress and box springs on the floor with her chinchilla in the corner. But the rest of the room was empty, save for each other and some books strewn over the carpet like gravel.

Eventually the once-white carpet in my apartment got so bad that it blackened our socks, and that’s when we started looking for an apartment together, and where our different versions of our futures started to emerge.

After the Greek Gods in the mall told us to buy furniture, we watched a pirate show on a boardwalk. We absorbed the story’s confusing conflict between the female and male pirates on the glassy sea. Then the conflict switched to dancing. We felt the warmth of the flames when one of the boats was destroyed for the second time that hour. It was not a good show but we loved it. That was our first trip together.

Out by Great Salt Lake Amy wore a gunmetal blue jacket and we searched for bison. We’d been drinking. She was looking for the bison and I was following her across Antelope Island.

Some crows left the tree as we approached, but their bodies carried the shape of a tree, as if the shadow peeling away.

A memory: In Wendover, we ate at a faux-Paris restaurant with pin holes in the purple ceiling to approximate the stars. She took a bath in the hotel and in the morning we wandered around the desert drinking Bud Light mixed with Clamato tall boys. I remember thinking I could have done that forever, if only I didn’t have to go back to work.

When it was too cold to walk home, I’d pick Amy up at the restaurant. After a long shift, she howled every song on the radio, something she never did unless she was on the post-work high. She would scream the songs of whatever came out of the speakers, on whatever theme and in whatever tempo or tone, until she could hear her own voice.

We once were apart for two months; not split up, just apart while she visited family in North Carolina. I waited for her next to a large family welcoming home a Mormon missionary. I was overjoyed that I was with her, and I loved being warm in an airport while it was freezing outside loved the returning missionary loved the shiny gilled baggage carousels.

There were times when we both worked so hard with bullshit jobs that all leisure started to look romantic. Our friends would tell us stories about getting high and watching movies, and we would despise them, failing to remember that the story had started as a sad one about unemployment and directionlessness.

We both knew the four who drowned in the cave, and up until that point we’d experienced nothing more tragic than lost religions. I’m glad I knew you then.

I have heard people describe relationships, particular the virginity-breakers, as “making them into a man,” but this was not my experience. It didn’t make me into anything different at all. It opened my vision to a place beyond where my longing had been able to see to that point, and otherwise I was the same.

That night at Utah Lake, the wind whipping in all directions. We’d walked down there and during the walk it got too cold to walk back. We hid in the rest area to get out of the wind. It was too cold to fool around and we just stood there holding each other and breathing in and out, our breath visible.

Amy taught me how to pay attention. From her, I learned how to graze on details.

I don’t know where it comes from, the absolute certainty that a thing was meant to be and would always work. It’s not something I have felt often. But one day it was there.

I was ransacked when it was finally over, it was impossible to accept. Each morning act—making breakfast, putting on clothes, carrying out the trash—how hard it was to let that all go. And even now, I remember what it felt like.

We watched the water all day and wore ourselves out with watching.

I’d say that love isn’t anything we should feel we have to quantify or describe, yet it is something I don’t know how to account for any other way.

The clogged drains and the mess on the floor, the supermarket, trying to fix things around the house and never learning. The insurance-less trips to the dentist.

I can remember the feeling profoundly. I remembered it years later when I unsuccessfully tried to seduce you in the hotel, knowing you were with someone else. I’ve moved further along, learned to love in new ways in other realms that I will feel lucky I’ve experienced if I have time to reflect on my life before I die. But I still remember the initial mornings, the coffee percolating, a gray winter outside and us warm inside.

I have a tendency to grant myself the right to be sentimental as a reward for doing something well.

Before I met Amy, the most serious relationship I’d had was making out with Christy in the park when I was 15. I spent our early days together in pure terror that it was all about to disintegrate. Eventually it did, but not for a while.