I Have Made Promises I May Not Keep
by Shuly Cawood
Like the one where I told a man—a contra dancer—I would show up to his 80th. It seemed years away, so very someday. He made me swear, but he and I were in bed in Canada. I was so far from home. I was cold, freshly divorced, so newly out of love. I told him of course and I meant it, the way I meant that I could twirl fast with the grip of his fingers, I could sway to his waltz made of pop songs, I could stay as long as the the day of my ticket had not yet arrived. I walked his Ottawa city streets. Ice skaters slicked across the river, their blades cutting an indelible streak. They might as well have been writing their secrets in the frozen water; everything would be stuck so long before learning to flow again.
I had bought a coat with a fur-lined hood for that trip. I had pretended I was someone who could fly through Pittsburgh and arrive in a foreign land and take a lover and then leave him, which I did that January, which I did again that May, which I almost did in July, but my friend’s father died and my plane soared straight to Cincinnati, the way wings will flitter in the right direction if you just let them lift off. The promises I made turned into the flicker of city lights below, into little blocks of buildings with their needle-sized antennas, into tiny bridges I would never take though all those cars careened across them every day. I thought it might be that easy for me.
Even now I forget that once I made it all the way to Canada, and still, even in my new coat, I was so cold.