May 2011

The last time you were in the country for the summer was three years ago. You were 19. With weather warm enough for bare legs you almost expect your high school boyfriend to walk out of the engineering building and hook his elbow with yours. He doesn't, of course, and won't-- it's been two years since he replied to any of your messages and he's far from here, now. It's an anachronism to even have it in your head but there it is. It's May. You wish the neon confetti of springtime weren't here yet; you wish to pin the fluorescent floral carpet on the sidewalk back to the trees it fell from, bit by bit until you're dusted in fine yellow pollen and sneezing.

When it gets to be too much you watch a TV show about a dead girl, alone in your bed, face lit by blue light of your laptop, and you remind yourself that people die, that there are accidents and injuries and unexpected illnesses. Not just people on TV shows and in the novels you read for your lit class but real people with bodies and mass and weight and that impermanent physical existence

You live with seven friends in a house with walls so thin you always know the whereabouts of every other person, a mental map you never really wanted to have. After the first month of living with walls like these you can identify anyone from a few seconds of shared decibels. You know the way that Cody makes his coffee, the rhythm of his arms shaking the grinder; the way Kyle pounds on the stairs and the sigh of Jonathan; the purposeful strides of Emily.

You live next to a family. They own the morning; you own the night. When you wake early enough on the weekends you hear them as if they are in your bedroom, the toddlers taunting daddy daddy daaaaaady daddy daddy daaaady and shrieking harmless shrieks of childhood, impotent. Your bedroom and kitchen are adjacent to your backyard that shares a fence with theirs and in this way your lives intersect but never otherwise. It's clear: they own the back, with their postage stamp yard neatly kept, bushes high but not opaque. You own the front, with your chipped and chipping front porch and its illegal, not-suited-for-outdoor-use furniture, which you moved inside after the citation and then immediately back outside. You call it the stoop and you gather there, day after day until the year without warning pitters down to a slow drip, and stops.