All the Forgotten Things

There's a little girl in line behind me for the bathroom at the coffee shop. She's jumping up and down, hopping side to side, tapping her feet. She has to go and she makes me nostalgic for a time when I felt the same. What does it feel like to have to pee so bad you're dancing? When is the last time I felt that so vividly?

It was on a school-trip. We'd taken a three-hour bus-ride to some waterfall and on the trip back I felt the beginnings of having to go, but it wasn't anything terrible. I was sitting next to Gavin. He had a crush on me, and I had a crush on Chris Smith, who was sitting behind me and who always smelled like lemons and made me dizzy when he stood too close.

I remember about two hours into the trip feeling like the world was going to end. I had to go to the bathroom so bad that I folded my head in front of me, my leg shaking to a fast beat, praying to God, promising him anything and everything to let me make it to the bathroom without peeing on the seat so that the liquid would trickle to Chris Smith's feet. That's the last time I remember feeling that strongly about peeing...

Which makes me think of my grandfather and the catheter he'd carry around with him as he went grocery shopping; or to the hospital to pick up medicine for my grandmother; or on his little evening drives in which he, and his grouchy driver Peter, and me in the back-seat, and his whiskey bottle and glass carefully stashed away in a picnic basket by his sandaled feet, would head out in a little white car to dusty side roads lined with fading trees and hidden birds that made so much noise I felt as though my ears would explode.

And the three of us would just sit there with the windows down; me staring at the back of Dadoo's head-- his crumpled neck and sagging shoulders and little white hairs and wheezing breathing. And him lost in some long-ago thought, every once in a while barking orders at poor Peter to roll the window a little more up or a little more down, or to pour a little more or a little less whiskey. Whatever Peter did, it was never just right...and did I mention we'd be listening to music? Yes, old Hindi love songs from tapes so old and dusty that I'm surprised they didn't disintegrate midway through the song, leaving us all in silence, in our own thoughts, in that hot and humid car on the dusty road with the fading trees that I don't even think exist anymore... because most of the things I've written about are gone. They're over.