The Spanish Language

When Cybil left me she gave me a copy of Don Quixote in the original Spanish, even though as she may not have known, but certainly should have assumed, I didn’t read Spanish. She was the only woman I ever slept with whom I assumed when I met would never sleep with me. In fact she did more than that. It was really incredible.

I thought about her quite fondly for years years, even to this day cause it’s not like you’d complain when a woman like that ultimately leaves you any more than you’d fault the setting sun. And I kept the copy of Don Q. on the shelf not opening it--merely storing it with all the others I have--and not learning Spanish.

I took I down, though, when I moved out of that old house on Madison and thought about tossing it into the box of old sweaters and coffee mugs that was going to the thrift store. I held it, that thick, impronounceable, unlikely book so unlike the woman who gave it to me. It couldn’t belong to me, I thought and I thumbed the pages back to front aerating them for the first time in 10 years, if it was a day. That’s when I saw the inscription.

To me, of course. It read:

This Book Makes No Sense In English: Love Always, Cybil.

Though now I want to more than anything, I still may never learn the Spanish Language.

-M