Maybe I wrote too much about it
and that’s why I can’t ever forget now.
I looked back at old pictures yesterday
and noticed that she squints her eyes in pictures
the same way I do. Like we both want
to shut out the world when we smile,
close our eyes to seal in that happiness of a moment.

I believe that some of our parts
were probably made of the same substance,
or at least at the same time.

Sometimes I feel like a seagull
in a shopping center parking lot –
so far from the place I was made to inhabit.
They gather in droves and shriek
and it sounds so loud
without the ocean waves to drown their voices.
Maybe I’m just too noisy for West Virginia
and one day I’ll be somewhere that makes sense –
where I’m the right volume, like starlings
in Europe, like kudzu in Japan.