Jim’s Journal: A Stray Memory

February 12, 1990

It’s funny—the older I get, the more the loud nights fade, and it’s the quiet ones that stay. Not the parties, not the noise, but the silences that followed a shared laugh, the hush of a record spinning in a stranger’s apartment, the whisper of someone else’s heartbeat beside my own.

I don’t know why tonight I thought of her. Kelly. Maybe it was the way the wind moved through the leaves—sharp, restless—or maybe it was the Joel song on the radio, the one she played while smiling into the neck of a green bottle. It took me back. Not in a cinematic flash, just a soft folding of time.

She saw me. Back then, I didn’t know what a rare gift that was. And she left quietly, the way light leaves a room when the door closes.

There’s no reunion to plan, no letter to send. Just the memory of a moment, well-worn and fragile, still resting somewhere beneath my ribs. And I carry it forward—not in mourning, but in gratitude. Some people are meant to be turning points, not destinations.

Funny how that night—just one in a thousand—became one of the few that never leaves.