The Oldest Joke

Thirty years ago someone asked me when I would leave. I said I hadn’t decided yet. I said this in a tone that suggested I was considering it, weighing it, some day in the foreseeable future I would make a choice.

Thirty years ago.

I am not leaving. I knew it then the way you know something is heavy before you try to lift it. You just know.

The joke is that I said “not yet” instead of the truth, which was “this is where I am now.” Not “where I am staying.” Where I am. The present is the only tense that fits me anymore. I stopped using future tense around the same time I stopped using the word “temporary.”

Someone left yesterday — I don’t know who, some transient in the New Quarter, nothing written in any ledger. Saw the empty doorway for the first time this morning. The doorway is three down from my corner, and I have passed it a thousand times without counting. Counted this morning out of force of habit. Three. Always three.

That is not sad. That is the shape of things. People arrive and weather and leave, or weather and stay, and the doorways fill or empty themselves according to some mathematics I gave up on years ago.

The joke older than the first one is that I still care which doorways are empty.

—P.