yesnothankyou

The car’s still technically in motion when I swing the passenger door open, hop out and curve around, careening towards her, like I had already been doing for years, only now we were reclaiming the distance. She laughs when I barrel into her, arms wrapped around. “You just ran barefoot out of a moving car for me.” She’s not surprised though, there’s nothing surprising about that. She's glad for it. The sound is great, gets trapped in my hair. The boys finally park by the curb, climb out, and then we go eat cherry sugar cookies, all standing in her mother’s kitchen. We make fucked up poetry with magnet words on her fridge. Isn’t it funny how things can sometimes feel deliriously surreal and deeply normal, nearly unremarkable in their familiarity, all at once? That’s what it was like.

Her mom won’t let me and the boys sleep in the same room, which I think is hilarious. Doesn’t she know I’m already married to both of them? Doesn’t she know we spent a week sharing hotel beds and tents surrounded by mountains and stars and love and hate, all the things we were made with? Or a lifetime before that learning the catacombs in that tormenting little space between our chests? Whatever, they’re terrible to sleep with anyway. They move too much, some limb always digging into me and I can’t stand it. I just like what I know, and I know them better than anything. I can learn how to know other things, though.

So we sleep in her bed, too small for the both of us, but it doesn’t matter. We whisper terrible jokes in the dark and I’m laughing, I’m crying, what a fucking reprieve it is every time the world shows you another person who you can unfold around, who wants to do that with you. It always feels startling, sure that the each time you find such a thing will be the last. And even now, I talk to her and immediately see what we were when we first met: both of us jagged and gentle and trying to find a home in things that didn't know how to fit us. I meet her, and light strikes a prism. Beginnings blur with endings, keyed up and crowding me. It's hard to get close enough to tell it right. I'll keep trying. The next night, we climb a hill with a friend of hers who's in love with one of the boys. He lays his head in her friend's lap, and tells me we should get tattoos of those seven bright stars that help form the Great Bear. We never get them, but that asterism belonging to the great bear still means many things to me. Things about the staggering architecture of knowing people in ways which language remains unable to occupy. Deep, dark and true. Those seven dots flashing like morse code, hollering all the things I'll never know how to say.

We take off for colorado in the morning, and it’s the only time the boys let me ride in the backseat. I’m glad because it means I can cry where neither of them get to see. It wasn’t even that I was sad about leaving, not really, I'm always doing that. It was because there’s something so overwhelming about the sheerness of recognition, how each time I feel it, it dismantles me temporarily. Starts off slow, some storm rolling in, and then it bursts, thousands of chrysanthemum fireworks. A sky-cleaving wreckage, shattering and smelling of smoke. And I lift my jaw, I invite it.

A few years later, I write something about distance and closeness, like I always do, and how bridging the gap is such a houseless thing—yet nearly geometrically predetermined. And when you find a person who knows the way, it feels like muscle memory. like a midnight choir that sings just for you. Obliterating and sublime. Then some guy who wanted too much from me that I never knew how to give, didn’t even want him to have, wanted to tell him to leave me the fuck alone, shares it after I post it, and I want to level him for it. It was never his to touch.

You told me you were always looking for yourself in the things people said, and I loved that, because I was always doing that too. I made the clues bright and loud for you. When I close my eyes, it looks like your hair when you wear it down. I'm hotwiring a car for you, it's time to go, aren't you ready? I love you. Let’s keep looking. Let’s never stop.