Oklahoma City Mystery

She sat in front of me in Physics class

Sweet, quiet

She was always cute, we’d sometimes talk

But I was hesitant to ask her out

Julie

She confused me

Sometimes she’d come in freshly scrubbed

Looking nice, smelling good

And I’d think, “Yeah, we should do this”

Other times she’d come in, hair greasy

Sometimes with chunks of dandruff

Withdrawn, nervous

Looking underfed, nails bitten

With an odd smell

At first I thought the smell was her leather jacket

But when the jacket was gone

The smell remained

By mid semester she no longer had clean days

She smelled all the time

I worried about her

I worried about a lot of things

The Gulf War had just started

I might get drafted

Still, I worried about her

Until, one day after she had been gone a bit

She returned

Clean and scrubbed again

In a little red sweater

Happy, chatty

For the first time in months

She turned to me unprovoked and said,

“I quit smoking!”

I told her that was great

And we chatted a bit

I never talked to her again

No problems, we just didn’t

Then I found out she was killed

In the Oklahoma City bombing

She was working as a Spanish translator

I never really knew her

And now I never will.

(11/6/18)