MoonLune

I stand at the edge of the sidewalk where the grass meets concrete to see the way they turn from white to orange to pink to blue until I can only see the blinks of airplanes where the clouds used to be.

I count the turtles in the pond. I remark at how my own turtle couldn’t live in a pond what with her taste for summer fruit. Your laugh comes on like stones skipping water. In the garden I pointed at the bell flowers that browned and curled under the weight of sunless winter.

“It’s okay,” he said, “it just isn’t their season.”

I personify things that don’t feel the way that I feel. My lack of emotional-spatial awareness seems to call me to feel the implications of being a flower on a particularly fraught day.

We wade through the bamboo reeds. I’m holding my heart at the base of my throat where it always is. I see your eyes turn from crisp water blue to that of slow glaciers. He knows about the way my heart used to be something I held in my hands.

A trick I’m relearning, to hold it close and somehow without the embarrassment of every wish I’ve ever made. He knows my secret words, apt replacements that allow me to hide where everyone can see me. He knows the trace of my finger at his spine, the hazy look in my eyes when I’ve left me behind.

Tentative caress in hardly-up-to-code apartments, the first of many where we drive back and forth at 20 miles an hour to see each other for an hour. The first recoil at the first real thing. Gentle collapse back into the soft light of knowing. In my spare time I re-weave my history with as keen of a glance as I can bear. I tease out the threads that don’t fit my schemes before folding them in again. I wear it against the storm that will flood the streets my boots fall through.

I’m climbing. You have given me the softest socks, you bought my shoes in my favorite color. There’s always water for both of us. You flip the switches on and off in my mind and in our rooms. I used to think that it was gut-wrenching inability to eat, I used to think that it was my chest constricting and contracting against my will. The magic was in the pain of it. The magic was in patternless engagements.

It’s being twenty-two and then nearing the end of a decade. The Thursday night you skipped class and the Thursday night I was stood up. Your presence in my periphery calling me to any side of the room you stood in. It’s my favorite freckle on your arm. It’s hearing the stir of your breath when you sleep. It’s mistake and misstep, God on a smoke break, communion with the people that have seen me turn from temperamental child to butterfly-goo, to the only person they know who loves making phone calls.

I hold my heart in my hand.