yesnothankyou

Sitting there in that field where they practiced and the sun was hard on us but we didn't mind it, I don't ever mind that kind of thing. My mom used to say I was born for it, just to sit in the sun. I think so too. We were cross legged in the grass and the little white clovers freckled the lawn like a field of tiny moons. I was making you flower crowns that you weren't going to wear. You held them in your hands though, pulling the rings of them around your fingers. Watched you weave those knotted stems over your calluses and it was like I could see us from up above somehow. My imagination is always doing something like that for me. We left, rubbing the dirt from our hands on our pants. I love the act of that, getting our clothes dirty to keep our hands clean. We drove around looking for a place we'd never live in together, peering in windows, hands cupped around our eyes. An empty living room, a white brick fireplace, a doorframe leading into a hallway. Think about furnishing places only with the things you've already collected. Incidental, unintentionally important. We gave up after awhile and made jokes about the sky. Made them poetic, made them stupid. What right does it have to taunt us with what it knows? What right do we have to look at it? I'll get drunk and finally show it what I got. The song was something old which is how we like them so you turned the sound up and I rolled my window down, let the wind spill through. The afternoon kept going, on and on, the sun had nothing better to do but give. That's a holy exchange, you know. We didn't talk because we didn't have to. The soft clicking of a turn signal, taking roads that I know by heart still. Layouts of neighborhoods, storefronts and stripmalls, all of it memorized before I even wanted to. Everything's always working against me and when it finally lets up, I'm homesick. I could close my eyes and know exactly where we were by whether you took a left or a right, the feeling of you slow rolling through a stop sign. I didn't close my eyes though. I watched those big green yards with all the evidence of lives happening in them that I knew nothing about. I was grateful, I was distracted. You took us to the park and we sat on that picnic table on the outskirts of it, making phonecalls to strangers again. I smiled so big. I threw my head back, I laughed up at the tree branches and they reached for me like my laughter meant something to them.