stone fruit

This was summer. This was summer in all its glory, full-throated and poignant, none of autumn’s fine cool light or springtime’s indistinct haze. This was brassy sunshine and the turn of a young girl’s ankle in the grass — beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. His hand between my frail bare shoulder blades and the sun-warmed bronze of my summer-skin, nights that came too early and left too soon. The world was coming up verdant and green, the sky wild and disordered with stars, and around us a lonely city breathed light.

I was so tired of living in a place where we condemned all that we couldn’t understand. I loved him but he did not love me: the beginnings of a dozen different songs, each sweeter and softer than the last. I had the words but not the voice, no melody with which to sing them. So I held them inside, rib cage forced full of hollow space, every inhalation a rhythm. 

I remember the way the light fell lurid and golden, the loam soft beneath my feet. This is how it always will be, he was telling me. You will never be free. You will always fall for him and he will always ruin you — you will always emerge as something less than you were before. Summer in its loveliness, so solemn and so sad, the bittersweetness of it all in the back of my throat. It ached, and it was beautiful, and I missed him terribly: brassy gold hair soft as a fawn’s throat and cropped short, green-gray eyes and a shy smile. Being without him was almost like living in a world without color: but if you’d never known it, how could you be expected to miss it?

We do not serve one another by obeying temptation — I know that better now. I see him in everyone and everyone in him; summer still steals the breath from my lungs after all this time. I was so sorry that he ended up being one of “those”, warm and promising as his infrequent smiles, but ultimately just as empty as he claimed me to be. So instead I am writing this letter, one that I will never put in the mail, never address, never seal in an envelope. I can’t say that I don’t know why we hurt the people we want the most. I know it’s because I wanted him to reach for me. 

One confession: I still don’t know what love is. I know that it’s one step below obsession and one above compassion, sideways of affection and in between want and infatuation. I hear that it’s supposed to be perfect and selfless, but the extent of my knowledge begins to fade to black when I think about all the times I could have done better. 

So I might not know what love is — but I do think I know what it’s not. 

call us liars

I think I saw you first in a dream. Broad face like a cat’s and vulpine cheekbones, eyebrows long as brush strokes and slender as willow leaves. You had a luminescent and open quality to your features, like an elf’s or a seraphim’s, that everyone always mistook for innocence. As a result you were an interesting creature, impatient and unlovely in nature, but still somehow magnetic. People always watched you. You drew eyes like flies to honey.

Now I imagine you reading my words, every syllable and intonation, every hidden turn of phrase that I worked so hard to conceal. You will never know that this is about you.

You were like a language I’d once known but had now forgotten, a song whose melody escapes me entirely. I used to imagine the pair of us far out to nowhere, in the poignant empty plains where I could rest my head and where you could sleep. A beat-up car with a broken radio, the sky disordered and wild with stars. I had a dozen different dreams and you were in every one of them. I remember running my hand through your dark cropped hair, soft as a fawn’s throat and shorn close, and the heartbreaking blue of your eyes. You sat outside of the motel with your gaze shaded, feet kicked up on the railing, a bottle of cheap off-brand soda in one hand and a fifth of Swedish vodka in the other. I would have burned the world down for you, I remember telling you—and you smiled then like I’d meant it. Maybe I had.

We both liked to drive just before the rain, loved how the light always held itself in just a certain way. The gleam of sunshine throwing a gleam onto the gold of your dark hair, your frail wrists—too slender for a man, too slender, but marked also with gruesome tattoos. How many tattoos do you have? I asked you once, and you said you didn’t know — you’d forgotten, just as you’d forgotten so much else.

How quickly someone you know becomes someone you knew. We kept to ourselves in the darkest ways, abusing shot glasses filled with tepid vodka and pints of sweet whiskey-rye. We’d each sworn that people belong to people and not to a place; we promised we’d never part. But I didn’t belong to you, and you didn’t belong to me, and our brief mistakes—shirts and jackets strewn across the room, you holding me up against the wall with a hand over my mouth—vanished  as soon as we each left the bed.

“Another secret,” you would always say before you left. I didn’t know if you meant the shame or the scratches down your back, and it wasn’t my place to ask. 

death by winter

She's not 'running away'. There's a negative connotation to those words: one that she can't easily escape. It sticks to the roof of her mouth. She's just 'getting out of here'. That's it. She's forging her own way. She's packing her things in a suitcase, something that she will be able to carry down the street, into the bus, onto the train into the city. She counts her cash. It's enough. It'll be enough. 

I have dreams like this. 

I've built my own personal Jericho. Walls are temporary; they will crumble, but for now we hide. I am not stagnating, suffering, lying. I am saving myself instead. At night I pull myself onto the kitchen counter and practice self destructive habits. They are quiet, elusive. You won't see them unless you watch. Look for a blurry eye or a shaking hand, a hint of too much medication. The doctors deny both my future and the fleeting fragility of my mind. I surrender only in sleep, in dreams. I wait for the day that these walls can break and the girl with the suitcase can take the train far away. 

Ice is clinging to the branches in Detroit. Winter reminds me why we're alive. I want to cut off all my hair, watch it fall to the bathroom floor. Tell the girl to get the fuck out of here before it's too late. She'll swivel on the chair, watch the black hair fall. Listen to my brother and I fight. "Why are you so unhappy? Why don't you try? Where is your medication going? Who are you, anymore?" "You don't have to deal with me, you know you don't." "I know I don't." Commence with awkward silence, because we both know it's my fault. It is, after all. Hair falling to the bathroom floor like feathers. 

I'm not, by nature, a particularly dramatic person, which probably explains my desire to get out of this place. Respite comes like a drug. Late night car rides, heat blasting. Drink jack and coke and sit on cold stoops. Laugh with a stranger. Our hollowed insides are starving for something else. We cram inside crowded rooms and somehow, we don't touch. That's what I never understood. How we never touch. Our eyes never meet. 

That girl is going to take the train far away. She says she's starting over, but no one is going to believe her. They all say that. Half of them come back. She's not going to do that, because she's desperate. She's more desperate than I am. Because I'm still here, in the freezing rain, with the lengthening shadows and the grey skies.

You say, I think I'm getting out of here, I think I'm meeting someone beautiful, I think I'm going to California. And I'm begging you, no, please don't, you, and you, and you--you're the only good things about this part of town, and the snow is falling in Detroit, and it gets cold without you. Take me with you, because my reserves are nearing empty and Jericho is coming down. The ropes are wearing thin, and Jericho is coming down. It's all coming down. 

when I lost myself I thought of you

I thought that if he opened a vein it wouldn’t bleed. Coarse-skinned and blue-eyed, voice like the last clear breath I’d drawn for hours. I’d invested so much time and effort in denying the truth that I no longer knew what to believe -- and then there he was, all that temperate kindness and my reluctant admiration, trying to repeat these inimical patterns as if I’d been born to every one. We abused ourselves in the quietest ways, shot glasses and beer cans and bottles of tepid whiskey, shoulders brushing on the quiet Detroit streets and the light setting fire to the red in his hair. And I needed someone. I needed someone who wasn’t you.

My heart was too full of beauty to admit fear. I can remember one of the last nights of summer, the cicadas filling the air with purring sound, the heat humid on my damp skin. He was drinking from two half-empty flasks, offering me lukewarm vodka and the cheapest rye and the barest traces of early autumn wind. This was where it began and where it would end, he told me, holding me gently in his eyes – the world is circular, and so are we.

We were always saying goodbye. I only turned to him because I could not turn to you. Unhappiness, he had told me, was the human condition. And we only belong where we’re not.

I didn’t know him, but a part of me loved him, and the rest of me didn’t know why.

We spent days wasting the time away, kneeling on his old sofa with our foreheads each pressed against the other, our breathing even and sweet. I thought of you — of course I thought of you — but he was edging his way into my heart, and I wondered if he’d been my phantom limb all along.

At this point I was living in someone else’s dream. Nothing of my life seemed my own. His eyes were blue, yours were black, and both of them radiated a kindness with which I was entirely unfamiliar. I marked my name in the wood-bark of his heart and it remains there still. 

When I lost myself I thought of you. We’d survived everything but now it felt like nothing; we drove to a place where time doesn’t matter, and these were our perfect hours. I was dark and you were light and we were each half-in love with the world around us. We are not allowed to know our fates—but I knew you would be in mine.

open wounds

What if it really was God, though, and He decided I just wasn’t worth it?

You were the one who taught me how to leave. There were thousands of ways to say good-bye, you told me, and so few to say hello - the dialect between us was written in partings. I waited for you to come and then for you  to go: in the night, in the morning, in predawn’s violet flush. You had countless kinds of farewells and I could feel them in every limb of my body, every rush of heated blood; this was how we existed to one another. This was how we spoke, the two of us. Not in whispers but in lies.

Your affection was a drug that couldn’t be traced. Your hand on my bruised wrist, the jut of your hip against the dip of my side, marking out maps on my skin. Throat, mouth, hair - you spent hours tracing the body that I’d come to know as someone else’s, someone who was not - who couldn’t be - me. Each of your absences felt like an ending. I was wary of breaking this fragile thing between us, terrified of holding you so tightly that I would be the hand around your closing throat. When I left your apartment I’d wander the streets before returning to my car, the lack of you like an open wound salted and stinging, two lovers who would never be in love.

I’d written an elegy for the loss of you far before I lost you. I sat at night on the porch swing in my backyard, bare-footed in the heat of summer. I smoked cigarette after cigarette, my hand drifting over the page, crossing out every other word, every apology until the morning birds came to join me. Forgetting is a form of forgiveness, I think. The moon was still cleaved in half by shadow in the sky. I saw it then as a metaphor of you - half concealed, half light, always out of reach. The rest of them could have the stars; I wanted something more.

There are people whom you positively ache to please.  I didn’t understand why: why the expression on your face softened the cruel edges inside of me, how when I was with you I wanted to peel my skin away and find someone better underneath. You were too gentle for a man, too soft, too kind — this frightened me more than it would have if you hadn’t been.  Cruelty is easy, cruelty is sharp — kindness is enough to terrify. Kindness is beauty, and whatever beauty is, we quiver before it. I never liked light eyes until I saw yours, I wanted to tell you. I always wanted to tell you. But I never got the chance. 

You left. It didn’t matter, though, because when you diseappeared–in a way– so did I. One instant there, another vanished. I would have been kinder, softer, sweeter—but none of it mattered. We were never meant to get any further than we did. Let it be, I can imagine my mother saying, take a breath and let it be. 

sober

I was killing myself from the start, my initial decomposition originating at the vulnerable age of 18. Death meant nothing in those years. I was obsessed with life, and light, and all the glorious strains of sun on my honey-hued shoulders. Existence was like a vibrant summer, even then; it came too early and left too soon.

But what does that even mean—a beginning? The pain only comes when you remember. I have blurred vision from those days, my eyesight slightly skewed, the memories drawing only further and further away. Sweet honey whiskey and the poorest vodka, the forest evergreen of gin. How many mornings did I wake in someone else's bed, head heavy and tongue filmed with alcohol, the evening before nothing but a dizzying blur? 

I remember one solitary July night, redolent with silence and the spice of summer blooms, the nocturnal heat seeping into my skin. I was watching your garden die, sunflowers swooning and tulips gracefully bowing their heads, you observing me from across the loam. It wasn’t long before wandering hands caught up with wandering eyes — the blaze of touch trailing white hot along your fingertips. Soft sighs. Reclusion. Isolation blurring the lines of want. You mapped me out with your hands, gentler than I deserved and gentler than I’d come to expect. I would have burned the world for you, you know. I burned myself instead.

Whoever said time heals all wounds had never seen ours, and I was unsure which pain was worse: the shock of what happened or the ache that we never would. I’d opened my heart so that I could breathe and instead only choked on the gusty air, the emptiness of all that space between us. I wanted so badly to transform, to reassemble the structure of the bones within me. To become someone – anyone – else. I was not so lucky.

“Fall for him, but don’t let him ruin you.”

But it was too late for that – I’d stumbled headfirst into your world, spent days at a time drinking on your moth-eaten couch, you running your fingertips along my slender forearm. One taste of whiskey and I could not go without it: then followed the pills, the painkillers, the stimulants which stirred me into a manic frenzy. There’s always a deeper wound, if you know just where to look. And mine had always been you.

It ended between us in silence, in the solitary glow of a kitchen light at midnight, us both strangers to the other. I measure love by how it ends; you always missed me more than you loved me. And when you left, so did I – two diverging paths in the midwest, open plains and aching blue sky, both of us washed in a beautiful loneliness. This was love, I came to believe: the leaving. And I could think of nothing worse than that. 

manic

hypomania:

when it feels good: The swing seems to begin with disrupted sleep — or is it the other way around? When I was 21 I stayed up long nights after long nights, and spent days enmeshed in grand ideas while scorning the idea of rest.

I feel a pleasurable amount of energy or sense of wired irritability, the sense that someone has taped my eyes open and given me an injection to keep me awake—a ridiculous display of hyperactivity. My body simply can’t stop. Things seem clear, profound, dramatic.

Restless but focused, capable, clearheaded and smiling, despite having slept less than 10 hours the last four days combined. When I wake up I feel briefly miserable but it passes in moments. I snap at my mom when she asks if I’m “having an episode”. No, I say, I am not. Coffee makes me euphoric. I am not out of control. To the contrary, I am perfectly in control: a beautifully-functioning human being, much more talkative than most but not engaging in anything overtly dangerous.

I find myself hilarious. I form witty dialogues in my head and use them aloud, making everyone me laugh; their appreciation washes me in a beautiful sense of well-being.

I always feel witty, more attractive than I actually am. Aches and pains vanish. There is so much going on around me and the world seems profoundly beautiful, much mores than it ever has before. My body feels as if it’s buzzing with pleasure. I have the perfect amount of energy; I am awake, present, and euphoric. Everything makes me laugh and I have to comment on it all. I seek out customers at work almost as if I’m being pressured to do so. I have so many ideas; I am constantly planning things out in my head and carry them around with me, desperately, all day until I can tell a parent or a friend, because the concept seems vitally important for some strange intangible reason. I do not need to eat, or to sleep; hunger is an afterthought or disappears altogether. and I keep thinking about Alaska. Alaska, Alaska, Alaska. Life is full of an unseen beauty.

when it feels bad: I am irritable, uncomfortable in my own skin, wide awake and fully aware of everything that is going on around me. within me there is a certain thread of distress, although I don’t know where it’s coming from. I am impressed that i’ve been awake for the extent of time that I have and/or I try and fall asleep and wake up after less than a half hour, my body coursing with energy or my heart pounding. When I’m not irritable I make plans, particularly volunteering ones. I cry over videos of abused animals. I have ridiculous ideas, like that I’m going to go to Alaska, and am searching for tickets because it seems like a GREAT idea. I have a restless energy but no pleasurable sense of elation. I do talk—a LOT. and I talk over people. my thoughts come hard and fast and they feel more important than everyone else’s. I decide to change my major to biology (what the hell was I thinking?). When I lay down and close my eyes after hours upon hours of consciousness I know that there is no point. my insomnia is past insomnia: something has plunged my whole self into wakefulness. I jump back up, go back onto the computer and search for plane tickets. I feel good but also worry that my brain may go out of control. when I go out with my friends I drink a good deal of vodka because I know it will make me pass out, but instead it just makes my thoughts more poignant, pressed and elusive. two, three hours of sleep and I am awake again, searching for something that i’ll never find. I do not surround myself with people—I know that my talking will drive them up the wall. I ensconce myself in a castle of my own mind. After a few days of my sleep having vanished entirely, I feel vaguely like a prisoner.

true mania:

What was before a sense of pleasure, sureness and occasional euphoria has morphed into utter rapture.

Words can’t describe it: boundlessness, expansiveness, fullness. I am sublime. I realize I feel differently as I walk from the break room back to work—everything around me is so bright that it’s painful and I feel like the world is light as air. I feel as if I have wings; I am propelled, thrumming with energy and a euphoria beyond euphoria. It is at last ten times the sense of elation I had when I was given Dilaudid in the hospital. it is beyond that and more.

I instantly feel pity for those who have to shoot up amphetamines to feel like this—and at one point I almost feeling like crying, as if I’m touching dimensions that were previously hidden from me. Around me the world unfolds with a painless precision. I find that my previously shortened attention rate is almost gone; I flicker from thing to thing, aimless, but unable to stop the compulsion.

I have an uncomfortable amount of energy within me now. It causes me physical pain to stand still for longer than a few seconds. When a coworker comes to talk to me, I get the impression that she believes I’m on cocaine. I begin to talk too fast, to laugh too much—I can only realize this looking back. People begin to look at me strangely and ask me to repeat things. They can’t keep up with the perfect stream of my mind.

Self-confidence is through the roof—actually, I am beyond self-confidence, as I am beyond everything else. people are miniscule, unimportant. I’m sure they are perfectly nice people, but they don’t matter right now. who cares what they think? I smile so fully at them because I have a secret that they don’t. I am touching something they will never get to touch. I try to explain these feelings to people that do matter, but they just give me looks of alarm. I probably sound crazy.

The world is cartwheeling, carouseling around me. The walls breathe. My senses are heightened to utter exactness. I can hear everything—a whisper off in a corner, a laugh to my right. I am one with nature, with everything. I feel everything, see everything, hear everything.

I drift, I waltz, I float... who knows? All I know is that I’m touching something previously untouchable, reached some unforeseen height. My thoughts are slippery, here one moment and gone the next, mere fragments. my life has a greater purpose than I thought. I can do anything; absolutely anything. I realize that if someone told me to jump off of a building because I could fly, I would do it.

I am driven towards others and it is almost painful. I must speak; and I DO speak, over them, interrupting them, stopping them. I must be in contact with people—I must! but they are too slow for me, and they frustrate me. When I speak they give me strange looks. But what I’m saying is making perfect sense.

Energy boundless, overflowing, in excess—words come perfectly to me at first but soon they are muddled, hurried, rushed. Thoughts are like stars. Everything makes sense; everything is connected. My brain is a perfect machine but it is getting out of control. Cannot stop moving. And yet I don’t care; I don’t acknowledge it. This is the most beautiful thing I have ever felt and will ever feel. it makes the joy of mere happiness feel muted and grey and drab. it is ecstasy, wild and pure and endless. I think that even true love pales before this feeling—this “feeling”, whatever it is. All I know is that I hold the world in my hand, and I don’t want to let go.

asleep at the wheel

You’re no one from a past life, not a stranger who I know. I’ve never seen you on the street, crossed the lines to avoid your gaze - you’re entirely unfamiliar, the hard-set bones of your face amorphous in the settling light. I try to score these words with rhythms, a pattern to make sense of the disarray. But you’re no one to me, and as close as I draw you will only grow further away.

The wrong consonants skip off my tongue. Sentiment. Fondness. Preoccupation. You’re what never quite fits. I’ve written and erased these lines a dozen times and yet it doesn’t grow easier, explaining in words what can only be understood without them. 

In my head you take up more space than you should be allowed. Of course I’ve thought of you somewhere far out to nowhere, head bowed against the receding honey-colored light, reticent and quiet and without words; sometimes our souls take photographs of things they have wanted but never seen. Just don’t idealize me, you said - there’s nothing in me worth idealizing. But it’s so easy to see the goodness in anyone but yourself.

I can see you like this: curled into yourself like a question mark, a cigarette hanging from your mouth, smoke dizzying the air around you. You, bent over at the waist with a bottle of cheap whiskey in your hand, sweet captured sunlight and the face you make when you swallow; your hair, the profusion of it made darker by the cast of light. I see you this way, then; lonely, and proud, and proud of that loneliness. This is what you do to keep the fear at bay: surround yourself with those whose hurts mirror yours, the deepest cuts of the dullest blades. Quiet eyes, your wrist flicking a lit cigarette out of the car window so that it sparks on the oily streets. Yes, I want to tell you - I think that I understand. But I don’t have the courage.

I want to dream myself into a place that I’ve never known. “Another world is possible,” I’ve read - broken hearts and broken bones, the widening of streets and of water. God help you, the priest told me the last time I entered a church - but it wasn’t what he really meant. May you help yourself. I see beers overflowing the icebox, shot glasses lined up like bullets, wine in tiny cups. I see this, and I see you, and I see the path we’ve left behind: my vices have always interested you more than my virtues. I don’t blame you for that. I don’t blame you for anything, this world that cut us astray, and I don’t blame all of my sins for looking just like you.

tripwire

It happened too fast, almost, for me to remember. And still I’ve captured it like an animal trapped in amber, turning it over and over in my hands, trying to make sense of the little things that change us forever. I recall that first day with all the vividness of youth: you, dark-haired and quiet, a bag slung over your narrow shoulder, the way your winter-dark eyes narrowed just slightly as you looked at me. Something turned over in my chest, dizzy and strange, forcing it full of hollow space -- and I knew at once that you were the story I would never be able to tell.

I was too young to know that this would not be the last time. The curve of your shoulders like wings, the slope of them unburdened and the sprinkling of freckles like cinnamon, the weight of all your silence. The glint of hard white teeth when you smiled. “Am I okay?” I asked the priest, at that point all wariness and unspoken fear. “Is it okay that I love her?” 

I remember: the two of us, curled together half-asleep at some college performance, your lashes like gossamer against your cheeks and your mouth half-parted, feline even at rest. I could have told you everything, I see now. You were the tripwire, the inevitable parting, the innocuous ending of us both. I wanted to crawl into you.  I was tired of looking at girls with dark hair and dark eyes; I was tired of looking at girls who looked just like me. And still there you were, that sharp gasp of happiness in my short life, your shyness obscured by shame. This was me, and that was you, and these were all the words we left unspoken:

Want. Alone. Hunger. Loss. I wondered how many lives I’d lived before I ended up in this one - looking into you like a mirror, the reflection just slightly skewed. The fullness of your upper lip and the curve of your impossibly dark eyes, the ash-dark hair to your shoulders. I cut mine just after you did. I thought that if I did that we could become one another, grow closer than we ever had. I was wrong.

All that suffering teaches you is that you are capable of suffering. The broken-hearted girl and vulpine-faced liar, the yearning quiet dreamer - these were all but different parts of me. And you took them away one by one. 

I measure love by how it ends. I remember laying with my head in your lap, how your loam-dark hair haloed your face as you leaned down to kiss me, sugar-honey-sunshine-sweet. The summer world was fragrant with blooms and woodsmoke and sweat; when I reached up to pull you back down towards me, you laughed and shook your head. It’s true that when you start to think of the beginning it’s the end, and it’s true that there was something in your eyes - dark as polished jet - that warned the same. Don’t come too close, you were saying - don’t come so close that this will hurt.

So it ended, in northern travel shops and motel bedrooms, in the unsparing light of an autumn wood. It ended in bookstores and sand cliffs and the swoop of a bony arch; it ended in sunshine and stone. I didn’t know you loved it here so much, I told you.. You’d shrugged. You never asked, you said.

You left and I knew this would be the last time. But sometimes the people we love come back. They disguise themselves as strangers, as those we have not met, as the ones who make up the world. I try to catch a glimpse of you - curly black lashes and the scar along your cheekbone - but it’s like holding water cupped in my hands - I lose you every time. I crouch over the summer grass and remember your skin shaded with sweat, black hair oiled from exertion, the timid gleam of your smile. Memories are not food, but they will feed you. And every time I remember you, twin dark eyes and trembling grin, they do. They do. But I don’t want memories of black eyes flashing to mine in sunlight, your hand in mine on the sand-golden hills, the feel of your mouth trailing along my jaw. That isn’t what I want. I want you.

summerland

You always loved summer and I never did. I loved winter, the arboreal chill and flakes of snow like sugar melting in your dark hair, my breath like smoke in the air. You never understood. You always asked, “Did something happen, to make you hate the heat?” It was never the heat but everything that accompanies it: the pull of bodies towards one another at night, the peeling of sunburned skin like dragonfly wings on thin bare shoulders and the cough of car exhaust down roads dusted with jasmine and perennials. Summer was like a story I wanted so badly to tell but couldn’t quite remember.

I drift down these memories like rungs on a ladder. One skip and I’ll fall. I worry that I’m losing them, that if they cease to exist then it means you never did. By now you’ve vanished almost entirely, and I can’t remember your voice but I can, almost, remember your laugh - it tickles my memory with the agonizing brutality of anything one can’t quite recall. 

I collect songs that I know you would have loved. The first time I heard ‘Chinese Satellite’ I nearly had to pull off the road; it was the line that went ‘But you know I’d stand on the corner/Embarrassed with a picket sign/If it meant/I’d see you when I die.’ It hits you like this, in waves - years gone, lifetimes spent, and you’re still in the same place, because grief doesn’t walk a straight line. These paths recede upon themselves, again and again, and in the moments I’m closest to you they cut painlessly like the incision of the sharpest knife. You’ve become adrift, though, someone I write about instead of someone I know. 

Now I read books about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, sisters and brothers. Family. And then I acknowledge that as much as I read, and as much as I write, nothing will tip back the scales, restore me to blamelessness. This is the albatross around my neck - a very beautiful phrase for a very hideous thing.

So I try and fit your memories into my head and your kindness into my hands and your words into my mouth. It’s not always easy, especially the last; I’ve always liked to try to make hideous things beautiful and you always thought it was so strangely sad. But still, I drove through the Michigan summer towns last month and felt like you were there. I think that time moves more slowly in smaller places. Those little northern villages all seem like snapshots from a dying world: black tire swings by the water, arrow-winged birds swooping over currents of power lines and the sort of houses that look as if they’ve always been empty. Sometimes twin hawks wheel through the settling sky and it’s almost like catching sight of some beautiful vacationer flashing by in a car, hair streaming and face set vividly in profile — the sudden bolt to your heart, the knowledge that you will never have what was never meant to be yours.

I’m bad with faces and worse with names, but I could drive those roads in my sleep. Destinations are more familiar to me than people. The paths are inevitable, like those you walk in a dream; somehow, I always end up where I need to be. 

So no, summer was never my season, but it was yours, and that means more to me than I could ever say. My dreams of you are no longer nightmares of loss. Coasting through the midday heat, the beach to my right and the dusky forest to my left, I thought that I could almost breathe again. It was the feeling of returning, not to one’s home but to oneself. I’ll never love it, but I see why you did, and somehow that’s enough.