we make the best of things, she said about the rainy season
our ten-dollar words swallowed by timid tongues and our
mile-wide headaches on our shoulders

we make the best of what, quizzical I ask her
she stood to lose more but she was better
she ran five kilometers at a time
she ran pretty circles around my holiday smile

ten-dollar words instead of money I carry with me still
to remember that I got there once too and
to feed to the mechanic when the engine stalls

does the engine ever stall
it does

the bitter and undersold other-edge of perfection
where it turns around twice and settles down among
stuffed turtles and hedgehogs and buries its nose in its tail
only to spring up at the noise of passing traffic or
loud voices next door or
a sigh
overtakes the perfect first face of it
the one you seek your whole life and that
comes for an instant before fading to gray
and you scold yourself for the growing thought that
it looked better from a distance

tears on the steering wheel blur taillights
into september-christmas. raindrops in the rearview
become transitory constellations. an overdue
stop home slides away.

home ceases to be fluid sentences: becomes periods,
exclamation points, question marks, parentheses. staccato whispers,
sweet reprieves, lunch breaks, sick days.

you fit where they’ve left space for you. you know the shortcuts
and the long ways and where to get a coffee. you know where your
head rests on his collarbone. you know when to come
and when to go.

and then you go. and it’s midnight where you’re going and the
winged streetlamps beat like a butterfly migraine, eyes threatening to
close before you’re home.

wait—
which one was home, again

it was the hooded-sweatshirt, sit-close-and-pretend-you’re-cold, bleacher-seat,
whiskey-and-coke homecoming that you never had when the leaves changed.
but the leaves changed anyway.

the damp grass smelling vaguely like your fireplace as the world got quieter,
your nose in your precalc and your foot tapping and how-many-years-left
of solo fridays, you counted the suburban stars but didn’t tell anybody
how ******* beautiful they were above your head, because they were yours.

when you wore your high school colors, you were cold for real. no pretense
in your shivering, no flutter in your abdomen because he wasn’t gonna talk to you,
and you didn’t really care, you shrugged. but the leaves changed anyway.

and you changed, slowly. grew taller and smarter and prettier and then the
remaining solo fridays shrank to none, and you left. big sweet snowdrifts turned to spring
and you shared whiskey-and-coke with the city, your stars dimmer but abdomen
finally fuller, and limbs warmer and no sweatshirt because you didn’t need one,
and hands all over to hold and feeling all three kinds of love at once.

and then the accidental homecoming, and the changing of the leaves
and the hooded-sweatshirt shivers and knowing you’re so much bigger now than the
suburban stars and the backward glances of the bleacher-seat kids, but the damp
grass still smells like your fireplace and suddenly you’re small again, just for a
second but god that second, you shiver and turn around again. you’re so much
bigger than this but homecoming, this whiskey-and-coke homecoming still isn't yours.

refracted sunshine pauses on boxwood leaflets before
whipping around to color white walls white and whiter
just shy of blinding, shy of why’d-you-ever-look-away

quarter-miles before, a stone bridge frames a roadway with
one wrinkle, a painting you’d **** to catch on canvas, if
you could stop the car and hold it in your iris long enough

this morning, you woke from fever dreams to an it’s-all-right-now
I’m-here, and you saw that he was right as they faded and shrank
in the daytime and remembering it was you who once was

so insistent that the world looks good in gold

this summer, the first of its kind, has been a very difficult one. I’m not unique in my anxiety for having the comfortable, intricate, beautifulinspiringwonderful rug I’ve come to love so deeply over the course of this chapter of my life ripped out from under me, but I think I’ve felt the pull particularly strongly. I’ve also lost quite a few people that I loved and love, in varying degrees and to various uncontrollable forces—first distance, then ungenerous and unforgiving illness, then irreconcilable differences of bagel topping and dog breed preferences. my world has been even more transient and transitory than usual, weekends punctuated by drives from my old home to my old home, neither of which I feel like I particularly belong to anymore. my weeks taken up first by a job clouded with exhaustion and headstrong disinterest, then by nothing at all, now by a conflict of interest—a place I love inside a place where I never wanted to land.

on the nights when I’ve fallen asleep, dreams of crying parents and misfiring deadbolts have awakened me, and those nights have been difficult to come by. I’ve felt the ennui brought on by the inescapable digitization of the world and the awareness that I’m not smart enough to be above it. that I’m not smart enough to even properly love the poetry that I love, to speak the language that I thought I knew, or to use the temperamental dishwasher in my own house. I’ve buried my misgivings about myself in lamentations that my friends have been scattered to different cities, so they can’t prop me up anymore.

I’ve shared pieces of myself with people more nakedly than ever before and with much higher stakes, and though I regret precisely zero of those risks, I’m learning it’s true that the harder you fall, the harder you’ll fall, and the latter isn’t something I’m yet accustomed to allowing for myself.

I haven’t yet accepted the death of a presence in my life that has been so large and multifaceted throughout, constantly reminded when the GPS winds me through the churchyard where she officially is now and when I pass her picture on my kitchen counter and when I keep on loving her wonderful family. when I remember that she’s the reason I had these phenomenal four years in this phenomenal place, and the reason I’m for now sitting comfortably in a job that I love.

and I haven’t yet accepted this transition into having so little control, so little trajectory. it’s a big life. this summer, as I said, has been very difficult.

but august, in time, will fade into september, and when it does I can say “last summer was very difficult." and I can remember how to stand up straight and that there’s a reason I have those city-scattered friends in the first place. and I can figure out that the lesson I learned is that risking a fall makes for a strictly irreplaceable, exquisite six month repose—not just a bruise—and maybe a new city-scattered friend. and that the death doesn’t erase the radiance of the life. and that distance is sometimes bridgeable, and that figuring out where to be takes a little time, and that nightmares aren’t there during the day, and that everything is, little by little, sometimes, usually, always all right.

she was more than just the stuff of storybooks, she was one. hair long and light and breast-grazing, star-gazing wisteria-eyed girl. a mystery on spindly legs. a fawn I looked at once and never looked away from. her lemon-meringue demeanor, breathy bubble-bath speaking voice and short white dresses, sandy bare feet and a crinkled, secret smile were all I saw and I saw them as many times as she would let me, new eyes for her driftwood shell every day. she wasn’t from where I was, nor was she going where I went, but when I said hello, she flashed her sunstorm smile at me and buckled my knees. I loved her before we even met, and I knew she would never do the same because she didn’t need to; she didn’t need me and she didn’t need anything, she was freewheeling, she was everybody’s sunrise, she had that smile.

but I wrote the book on living impossible dreams and she told me her name one day, as the horizon painted her gold and stood her still in front of me. she told me where she came from, and where she was going, the gift of gifts: unwrapping her storybook from linen scarves on the sand that evening. this big and beautiful myth shrank to size: she was real. she was flawed. she had grown from sadness, she was scarred, and for that she was more beautiful still. she didn’t need me and she didn’t need anything and, what’s more, she wouldn’t have it. her doors were closed because she wouldn’t need anything, she couldn’t need anything, she was scared of needing anything like she wasn’t scared of anything else, and for that she was more beautiful still.

but I wrote the book on living impossible dreams. as I came around more often, she fell for me right back—my far-off wisteria sunstorm was quiet against my shoulder, breathing in sync with me and drifting off wrapped up in me, driftwood-intricate and real as no storybook before her next to me. she needed me, now, so new to her and laying her bare, stripping away the mystery on her gazelle legs and casting a fearful desperation on her long light hair. instead of needing nothing, she needed me more than I was there, just like she was afraid of. she couldn’t get enough. wrapped up in me so tangled she couldn’t see the horizon anymore. she fortified her quirks so they could stand alone, they grew overbright, she became them, they became all she was. a pretty driftwood shell, a mystery covering nothing but the hole her heart hides in, scared into paralysis by its own fevered motion.

what do I do with this new shell? this new shell that looks exactly like the first one but isn’t—her eyes are still wisteria and her laugh still air-light to the untrained ear, but my hands are too strong to touch her without cracking it. what do I do with this storybook I wrote myself into without permission, this fawn that refused captivity but now can’t remember she was ever free? what do I do with my hands? do I make them weak so I can hold her or do I leave her to herself? what’s the end of the story?

I wrote the book on living impossible dreams and sunstorms aren’t real. she smiles but now it’s only hollow. I can’t look at this beauty I destroyed. I walk away because I have nowhere else to go and I can’t watch her shrink. she was never mine. now she’s nearly nothing.