I feel the edge of summer tingling at the back of my brain, bumping up against my consciousness like a boat gently nudging its dock with the quiet pulsing of the waves.
I’ve never felt it quite this way before, the spring.
Years of downwards spirals, taking a nosedive straight into May, a sea of papers and projects and the unrelenting tide of solitude
have made me a creature of habit, one used to rejecting the offerings of warmer weather.
But this: I feel the earth shifting, plants shivering and stretching towards the sun, the bare dirt cracks a smile and bursts into new shoots and green growths.
It’s the feeling of being a new shoot myself, after spending so long thinking, I am a weed. I was made to be stepped on, I tell myself,
There is life. This is the earth’s promise in summer: renewal.
“you will always know how to ride a bike.” I’ve watched it come true, wheels spinning beneath her taut arms, hair unfurling from helmet. she knew before I ever taught her.
there is a way in which some things will always be familiar: the way we work together in the kitchen brushing shoulders, interpreting each other’s silences.
the eyes are the windows to the soul; I watch the way you watch the world, the subtle shifts when we both draw the same thing, differently. I see the way other eyes pass over you, or pay attention, but never latching tight like you’re the image they want to hold in their minds forever (the way I do). In the photograph of your eyes clear blue-grey-gold, I see the you that you would hide the vulnerability you deny— the truth to which I would give my love.
Teach me how to remake a shattered world, how to see the future in the clear, curved glass of a tall-necked bottle marked слива;
how to accept the gifts of the earth, to take the proffered flowers from the hand of a friend (without thinking in circles around inevitable decay) and fill the glass again with water, with liquid sunlight;
to stop time for a moment and hold a sunburst of petals, to watch the light of it spreading across the faces of those that I love.
Teach me how to heft the smooth bottle in my writing hand, how to let the cool weight settle into my palm without dashing it against the floor.
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