Every time I leave your house it's the same. The same fog, the same wet grass, the same darkness. Every time I try to make a three point turn and almost hit your mailbox. Every time I feel the loneliness. It sets in before I make it past your hedge (monkey grass that gives me goose-bumps when it brushes against my legs in the summer).
Atlanta was a series of headless buildings tonight. Low clouds. You would have liked that. You're all destruction and slow unraveling. I'm veils and burning fields. You make me certain of my absolute sanity. We scare men at Kinkos into giving us discounts. We stink of smoke and coffee.
Your mother campaigns for me to gain weight and does so successfully. Homemade bread and cheese and salmon - sometimes a piece of cake or a hunk of smoked beef. Some soup or other Bosnian delight whose name I can neither pronounce nor find a word for in English. When I ask your mom to make it I say it's that noodle-wrap-cheesy-meat-thing.
You like fragments too.
not to be broken.
We don't pretend
I hope all those fancy schools in New York reject you. I've told you this. I imagine us in Chicago, nursing each other through graduate school. I want to think about that. I don't want to think about the fires we've set to our lives. Maybe it was smoke that masked Atlanta, disguised as clouds. Like I'm disguised as a wife.
