Exchange Place

The way I remember it. You drank Polish vodka and told dirty jokes while we worked doubles at the Thai restaurant facing Manhattan. Work was a swinging door of men in white linen, howling at us, because a table of idiots couldn’t keep their mouths shut about the plate of green chilis. You’d fling out of the kitchen like a yellow canary muttering, some of us will drown in a glass, others in a deep cave, as you opened the jar of sour pickles. When hours began to hurt, we’d lean on soft doors under the gold Buddha and sing “Queen of the Night” with the aging busboys. We all loved Whitney. I was standing by the velvet curtain, you tried to kiss me, I was too busy losing ground with that (half-divorced) Cuban to even look up, too busy pulling myself from myself to see why stockbrokers loved you – your Marilyn blonde hair, the way you overpoured vodka, half spilling it on their ironed shirts. Life did not frighten you. Sometimes, we’d pretend to take long walks near the monument because you left Poland for New York on an ordinary Tuesday morning and needed a cigarette. I thought, how does a woman survive a city without a mother? Years later, I heard the story of how you ended it all at once and nobody said a word, how you almost suffocated in that American wedding dress, your face blurring neon in a polaroid, how we engraved carpe diem into the door of a single night.

I should’ve kissed you.