I think about you every time I’m washing dishes.
I don’t know what about washing dishes, in almost any sink, but especially when the sun shines through the window, brings me so readily back to your high rise a decade past…
When we were just friends, not even lovers, not even enemies yet.
Not detractors, deceivers, or responsible for each others pain yet…
as far as we knew.
I used to see you in everything, every little mundane aspect of the physical world and life in it seemed to have a corollary to our time together.
Now it’s just the dishes. Every. Single. Dish.
Locked up in washing…a sense of care I wish to give to the world, to those I love.
The smallest gesture I am sometimes allowed to do for folks who are wrapped so hardly in their own cocoons of self-reliance, that even sometimes relinquishing a plate or bowl reminds them that they feel burdensome.
It’s my little action to hairline the shield wall. The tiniest ice pick, excavating a child within Pleistocene ice.
I used to think I could reach you with a song…
If only I had the courage to write one.
I wished I could boldly explore the depths of love in such grand gesture as lyricism, metaphor, or (god willing) harmony.
But rhythm to the risk averse is one-note.
And I can toss that in the chest of regrets, with all the other too-lates, not-enoughs, misunderstoods that I’ve collected.
But if I pull something out of there, and make it, In the wrong era, In a different key than I thought it should have been in, In spite of myself and in spite of you…
Will you listen to what I discover?
Well,
Doesn’t matter though,
I’m doing it anyway.
Here’s to…