diary / by Edward Mullany

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The driver of a car I’d hailed from my phone this morning told me, when I asked him how his holidays were going, after he’d asked me how mine had been, and I’d responded, that his were likewise going well, but that he missed the country he was from, and that he wished he could’ve been there, though when I asked him what that country was, and he told me, and I tried to remember what I knew about it, from the details I associated with its name, so that I might make a remark about it, or ask him something to keep the conversation going, so that we wouldn’t lapse into silence, and lose the camaraderie that existed between us, he began to speak of his own accord, and to tell me things without my prompting, so that I discovered I needn’t say anything, but could merely pay attention and smile, and by the time we’d arrived at the airport at which he was going to drop me, and from which I was going to fly, he was singing a song for me in the language that must have been his first, or most beloved.