with eyes still closed,
woken by rowdy students
with 8AM classes, outside not-quite-ground-floor windows
distance fills a mind

the shrinking spacial gap
creates slack in the fraying rope
that connects us at our cores

it winds in and winds back out,
like the memories of months past,
like the inside jokes and wordless exchanges,
that show up and lace through my days

distance that thrives in the cool west-coast air
and in the delicate heat of here
it grows like the vines that crawl across the canyon floor

whose pale green leaves
don't quite seem to be of this earth
after a summer spent in the midwest
where the lush green life was anything but pale

but the color has faded out
like the closeness we once knew
as if it belongs only to those distant midwest months