The train’s rumble-clack wake in my windshield late this afternoon could not harbor the qualm that had risen from searching for Isela. What is in me? What? What do I recognize in those dusk fields as I’m driving myself back here?

She turned 25 today, and we hadn’t seen each other in close to two years. Muzquiz, three years ago(?), was the heart in one palm and the silver pestle in the other. I could love somebody prone to panic attacks, I knew. She had let her hair grow out long, but apart from that, she still resembled what insouciant creativity will look like when a boy stands on your porch in the rain smoking cigarettes thinking he could love you “if only. . . “

The Mujer told me long ago--and told me again an hour after I asked her to guess whom I’d eaten lunch with today--in a church sitting next to her friend, Linda, she had seen a vision of Isela and I getting married. But we never broke up; never dated, either. I just fed her through the most anemic battles of her soul while her boyfriend at the time was studying or whatever in Utah. Oh, he was coming back, they said. It didn’t surprise me that there was a barrage of guys trying to take her into their own fucklorn shapes when they broke up last year. I stayed aground and maybe sent her an e-mail, phoned on occasion.

I said to the Mujer on the way from dinner I wasn’t going to let anything take me back to the fall of 2000. But she said that faith had it’s own way of telling the story, and I didn’t want to listen anymore as she began to add that love was never ours to position. I never have to hear that again. No one does.

Isela was the last girl who ever made me believe in maudlin and insane expectations. Today, all I know is that we’ll probably spend the summer listening to the new PJ Harvey.

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