25

I dreamt of it twice and remembered it countless times. There was you and me and the thing between us I couldn’t figure out. It kept moving, shifting the way what’s just forgotten does when memory goes chasing after it, unsure of its shape. I brought myself to the edge of the water so you could join. I walked down the narrow line of stones you’d laid out, danced on them, that little stairway, and continued the descent. I even thought for a moment about taking you up on your offer of going back. But who could do that? We both knew that wouldn’t happen. Besides, that’s not how forgetting works. From that edge what had been the morning’s fog resolved into the faded hills I knew lay before the sea.

Pulled along by the wind, the water grew closer. Subtle movements and the possibility of an opening. Let’s go to the going and make something of the sound of opening mail. I sat in the small piece of shade I found and watched the shadows flicker as though they could finish my sentences. The breeze passed through us and the leaves shook and language opened, unfurled like daylong time-lapses of houseplants or an anemone closing upon contact with a finger, outstretched. I spoke to you even when I knew you couldn’t hear and looked towards you even when all I could see was a pale blue wall. I turned from the sea and walked back to the stairway to return my own gaze, thinking I’d notice a presence or feel my own ghost. Each time I noticed the grasses quivering they’d stop, suddenly still.

We fragmented ourselves into scraps of color torn into smaller and smaller pieces. Digital noise or confetti or grains of rice. We talked of metaphors falling off the table and the specifics of our not-yet-garden. We needed a new city to have planter boxes, irrigation, squash blossoms and lemon cucumbers in golden light. The city remade itself many times, and each time I moved it moved with me and each time it moved I'd drop whatever was in my hands. Still no garden, but spring came and in the sweetness of warm wind there was only a chain of springs. A whole season of forgetting.

There’s the somethingsomethingsomething and the windwindwind, the crash of the break, the ocean that opens again and again. I know that an invitation is only that, but I moved in your direction and wrote to you, searching for the joy of a morning below jacaranda blossoms and city smog. I wanted to find the connection between the way your lips opened reading the word you and the way description kept slipping off. The more I missed you the further away we became, and so I started writing to you again.