Here I sit in the middle of boxes full of those pieces of paper I have to toss. I found a special piece in one of the many boxes. This one was put away in one of the drawers back in her room. It’s a piece of time, folded, crumbled. It seems to be one of those little things I just jotted down on the back of an envelope or birthday card on a rainy night in New Orleans, or was it just another note shoved around to me across the bar or shoved in my pocket as she walked away?

No, I think it’s just a gift from that special dancing Maine girl on an escalator in New York, or from a Japanese waitress in Tokyo who always remembered what I drank. Wait. Was it that sweet sleeping girl on a bus who smelled of french fries and musk? Isn’t life, after all, nothing more than just a book of strangers who left you with final unfilled paragraphs?

Was it the Baptist Kappa Delta beauty at Louisiana Tech who sat in her white convertible waiting under the forest of weeping willows until you finished a paper and she saw you come running across the lawn?

It was probably back when that piece of time found you alone in the vast “nowhere” and how you felt when she spoke your name, and how she touched the arm of your uniform. Yes, that piece of time.

Or an autumn day when one of my lifetime of buses stopped in a tiny town in Kansas that looked like one vast sea of grass. It had a coffee shop called Little Tony’s, full of locals who didn’t remember who “Little Tony” was. But there was this blonde girl with smiling eyes sitting next to me who smelled of Chinese musk, and I remembered how she held the hamburger she was eating with fries. It was this young girl who said with a soft laugh that there probably never was a “Big Tony” or even a “Little Tony” but wasn’t it a fun story to share? She was getting on my bus, she said, and then after that we shared personal childhood stories for many dark hours, after which she fell asleep on my shoulder for a few very rainy hours while somebody’s portable radio two seats down played Peggy Lee through a long ago Kansas night. Yeah. Long ago.

Anyway, here it is in my old hand, and it’s found now. It was titled “Where Did Jesus Go When It Rained?” “Did he step inside a doorway in some village, his cloak over his head after running through the storm, and laughed at old Peter who hated the rain because it came with a special darkness?”

So here I sit in the last pool of sunlight with a faded piece of paper sharing with long-ago faces and the words they spoke. There’s “Scoop” Larkin, hard-drinking son of a writer on a tiny Illinois newspaper, who, while waiting for girls in that fabled Kappa Delta living room, taught me how to toss a deck of cards into a hat.

I hope to take this old yellowed envelope when I see them again on that last bus leaving Little Tony’s.

Stay tuned. My writing bus has enough gas left to run.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.