The history of the world for as long as I can remember

Casey Killingsworth

As far as I know there really is some pattern to the billions of poems we have left behind, you know, the old applications for jobs we never got, clandestine napkin messages to waitresses in the bars we drank at, the arguments we had with our wives that ended up as divorce documents, all those scraps of paper still orbiting the world like greenhouse gases.

At least that’s the way I see it.

Sometimes I like to believe all those scraps, the slices of memoirs we sacrificed for a single moment’s clear image of the universe, they’re like those little birds always flying synchronously together like storm clouds in the wind, an arc or maybe not an arc but all moving in the same direction, because all we can do is look up to try to figure out what they mean. But we can’t.

So how about this: what if all of history is contained in some woman you barely know, say an older woman, say one who checks your groceries out at the local market, who worked at Subway every Saturday of her life but caught a break when she got hired at the store and then got promoted to manager—which you didn’t know because,

you know, you’re busy too—which really helped because her partner of 28 years died and she had to make it on her own, what if all of history was defined in terms of her, everything that ever was, and is, poured into a vessel the size of the person scanning your cereal, hanging onto her every rotation around the earth?

What if?