hourglass
She hosts parties at her Chicago brownstone overflowing with bubbly champagne and dancing, men with white gloves and women with beads woven into their glossy hair, cars with the tops down lined up around the block that stay there until the early hours of morning. She dances with friends and drains every glass handed to her and never quite remembers the end of an event when she wakes up in bed the next afternoon with an ache in her head that's almost tangible.
She travels with the coming of summer, to Rome where every day is spent drinking wine, to London where every trip back is made with double the luggage she came with, to Monte Carlo where every part of her is kissed gently by the sun on white beaches. She learns new things and wears fabrics she's never felt before and sleeps on pillows in shapes she's never seen before, and it's almost as though it's the end of an era when she goes back to America but she carries on just as she did when she was abroad so it's okay.
She turns thirty, but the inevitable change she's waiting for doesn't come and she keeps throwing extravagant parties and drinking and smoking and travelling. Tom becomes deeply philosophical, or that's what he tells her but she can't know for sure because every time he gets into a lecturing mood, she tunes him out and thinks instead about what she will wear tomorrow. Pammy flourishes, all yellow hair and big, bright eyes. Cars get smaller, more streamlined. Buildings get taller. She realizes with a sinking disappointment she hides behind a radiant smile that everything has changed, but nothing has.
When the disappointment feels like a person that occupies space just as she does, when it seems to be sitting beside her, suffocating her, keeping her from dancing or smiling or drinking or doing anything, she finds her hands wandering to the secret compartment of a drawer in her wardrobe where there sits, carefully folded into a corner and out of sight, a silk handkerchief with the embroidered golden initials J.G. and she feels the beginnings of something that could be what she's looking for. She remembers a balmy summer a thousand years ago, can feel the heat clinging to her skin and the scent of honeysuckle on his breath and the love of a poor foot soldier whose name nobody knew and it's there, the disappointment fading, making way for something right on the tip of her tongue when—
"Daisy!"
She hides the piece of Gatsby and goes downstairs to the beginnings of a party, or the call of adventure in a far off land, to her place in an hourglass where the sands wouldn't flow, to the rest of forever surrounded by revelry and drink and dance and glamour. Change is somewhere, that she knows, but it is somewhere she can't see, everyday fading just a little bit until all that will be left is the ghost of a summer in Louisville that held every possibility, every dream, every moment that ever held any meaning at all and in the end it doesn't make the least bit of difference.
.
