Me / Us / All

I remember how it felt to become the color of his autumn coat – a hint of gray-green warmth pulled tighter. When walking all those trails, the trillium warned of how I would writhe. That was a long time ago and suffering is a choice. This and other ways I fail to explain why one might like to hike alone.

The daughter strums her guitar to kill time before the date. “House of the Rising Sun” climbs and falls from a young woman in love, and her mother can hardly make sense of how the chords both open and seal the wounds to come.

A prismatic web outside the bedroom window filters the wind and hangs like a dream-catching talisman, bouncing a little with each invisible push of air. The oriole song gets me out of bed in search of his body, which I find bathing in the stumbling creek just beyond the bay window. Have you tried the turmeric ginger tea? This and other delicate branching to suggest that something will catch the falling.

At the greenhouse, the conversation about transgender relationships tears clean through in a swift wave of fiendish grief. The anatomy of a bigot is no longer of interest; does that make me the reflection of what I see? I am not enlightened. I am furious and disappointed and functioning with half of a heart. Treating the living like we treat the dead would be a step up from this. Dead is dead – not male or queer or trans or cis or AFAB or asexual or right or wrong or liberal or black or depraved or pure . . . 

Please fix this. Me. Us. All.

The dog coils on the bathmat because the bathroom is as close as she can get while I'm writing in bed. Her eyes are covered by the shower curtain but her nose juts out, ready to alert her to any shift in the air.  Daylight falls and the glinting entanglement fades towards a literal transparency.  A single thought spreads like the rooftop shadows rounding the cul-de-sac ahead of twilight:  Catch me if you can, and if you cannot not, let us meet where we never left - a Möbius beginning to what cannot end.  Whole.  Me. Us. All.