dripping into autumn.
I. You dig a place for yourself, a place of aloneness, a place with no return address and no mailbox and no space at the post office for your letters or bills, and then you’re surprised when the mailman can’t find you.
II. The feeling that without your effort, without your explicit messages or phone calls or carrier pigeons or smoke signals, all the people in your life would float away. And when you test this theory, it proves true.
III. A towel a tissue a shower a shirt sleeve. Places to hide your tears.
IV. I’ve had dreams about deserts meeting tree lines and disappearing into fairy tales and trapping your shadow in chests of drawers and not sewing it back for you until you learned the difference between a thimble and a kiss.
V. A thimble you can take with you anywhere. A kiss can’t protect you from the tip of a needle.
VI. Darker hair and darker skies and the threat of rain for days on end. Never leaving your house without an umbrella and the one time you do, because the weatherman promised you it would be OK, you get caught in a gale and drown quietly caught in the grate of a gutter.
VII. It’s more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be.
VIII. It’s just the dip of needle into skin. The in and the out and the slow, steady burning, and then the look of all your disappointments when I take the bandage off.
IX. More than anything, it’s letting someone down.
X. It’s the only way you’ll ever have the upper hand.
