The distance between us was once the thickness of a floor — by Aaron Rabinowitz

Artwork by James Keul

Our apartments stacked like kinged checkers, our children overlapping in ages, you spoke with authority on buying meat in bulk and where to pick berries and how I shouldn’t worry that my two-year-old was barely speaking because you didn’t utter a word until you were four.

And then you were divorced and in diaspora down the street and you told me about being part of the bear clan and how you purposely had bad posture so people didn’t feel uncomfortable because when you straightened you were massive and intimidating like a grizzly. We got coffees and you chatted up the barista and I trailed you to the community center and to every stranger you said hello with unimaginable eye contact, and bold as a berserker asked the woman behind the desk for her name, used her name in your follow-up question about gym membership. I was only there in the sense that you spoke at me, did not stop speaking, did not ask me a question except in the way characters in movies sometimes talk to their pets as a clunky device to reveal their thoughts.

The next time we crossed paths you said you were swimming for six hours a day and you could do that because you were so buoyant and the next time you said you had a girlfriend in London and you had shifted your schedule to Greenwich Mean Time and the next time you were waving glowing lightsabers on the patio by the take-out sushi place

and then the neighborhood was quiet and then

you resurfaced. I came late to my children’s friend’s seventh birthday party and could not understand why you were there when your girls were not invited, why there was a picnic table filled with children in conical hats and one overgrown bear man sagging off the end of the bench. The birthday girl played a piece on the violin and while we were all clapping you said, Can I see that for a second? and took her violin and pluck-played Hot Cross Buns and we clapped again but with raised eyebrows, and as cupcakes were handed out I saw you had two boxes of ice-cream sandwiches by your feet which meant you must’ve passed through the park and seen the party and shopped for desserts and returned. They had since melted in the manic sun and you got yourself off the bench and told me, You can just toss those.

When the earth began to tilt away from the sun you spent more time with your lightsaber and though we all knew you were once more on the precipice of being whisked away, we tilted away as you swayed in the plaza with your plastic toy, a slow-motion samurai.

Aaron Rabinowitz writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. He won Meridian’s 2024 Short Prose Prize, PRISM international’s Creative Nonfiction Contest, and CANSCAIP’s Writing for Children Competition. He has held residencies in British Columbia, California, and Oregon, and his writing has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. His work is published or forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Acta Victoriana, The Nashwaak Review, Cherry Tree, and Jabberwock Review.