I
The streets are wrong which is a better thing to say than I am. Have you forgotten already? they ask and no no no I reply foot on the gas, do not mock me. But the road home leads to nowhere.
I’m just confused.
It’s been so long - this they already know.
Everything is new is what I hear from the trees. But it can’t be, no such thing. I simply stood very still. The world spun around me. And late in the day I called it my dawn; how could I be accused of being a stranger?
Now I’m looking at pictures of rings and writing it down: wedding beneath a willow. Does that make sense? Does it hold true? I’m consulting my old self, the one who saw it, the one who knows a willow in the bark and not the memory.
II
When I last swam I was sixteen and still I call myself a swimmer. Once, I could hold my breath for a long time. Down deep and fearless though maybe that’s not the word. I was always afraid - of all of it.
Would you hold me afloat if I was drowning? Jordan asks. I’d hold you even if you weren’t.
Tomorrow’s waters have their questions too, rough like new land: I’m waiting.
Are you coming?
I don’t know. Ask me later. Ask me quieter. Better yet don’t ask me at all.
III
A woman comes to the house. Softly spoken, with glassy blue eyes. She’s read my writing. She tells me things I’m yet to know and expects the same of me, so I try my best. I have three daughters she says (present tense) but one of them passed, only forty-two. Left kids behind. But when I miss her, which is everyday, I think of those children and say if they can get through it, I can too.
It’s probably different when you’re the mother though, I think. Because that’s not what’s supposed to happen, that’s not how it’s supposed to go.
But the words sit unused in my throat because I’m just a child and I shouldn’t speak on things I don’t know.
IV
Last summer I sowed seeds in the backyard. Thousands of them, maybe, from different packets and mixed all together and peppered over the wild. I suppose the wind swept away a lot of it. Though some took root; I could tell by the sprouts of green in strange shades.
It’s all gone now, of course. Torn asunder by my dad’s plans for more. (I don’t blame him for it, I know, there’s never enough of anything in this life.)
But in every flattened earth I see a warning: everything good leaving me because I will not go.
V
My dad asks me if I think Jesus really walked on water. Or if he really changed water to wine. Or if he really, really was.
What?
Jesus.
Of course, I tell him, riding two horses at once. My love for him and stories travel in the same direction. I think I should have told the woman: there is no horizon as wide as the forever you believe in.
Beautiful! I love these.
yessssshoe