This is how it happens.

This is how it starts: Friday afternoon, Guinness and cigarettes. The park with grass and sun. The way bodies and gravity interact with wind. This is the before. Eggplant, hummus, caramelized onions. Flex hours and benefits, while Frances sleeps and What time is it? Shit.

This is the house. People I know and people I don’t. A boy with kind eyes. The girls from two years ago. This is one spoonful of each decadence, and a friend saying It’s ok to need help and my head agreeing.

This is how I find myself in a papasan on a friend’s front porch. This is when she calls with The News, and everything starts to feel like breaking. It is still winter and I would be cold if I remembered how to be cold. This is saying Hush baby, go to sleep. Call me in the morning. This is saying It’s going to be ok and almost believing it. 

This is front seat smoking after dirty convenience store light. This is rap music, and bare feet, and her mouth warping around words until we’re laughing again.  

These are the people I call friends. Later they will hold me. I will let them because sometimes that’s what I need, but not yet. Now I will arrange my face so it looks like my face, and dance until the poisons coalesce in the bloodstream. Until the evening knocks me off my feet. This is getting back on my feet. This is saying I have to go.  

This is how I run 15 blocks towards or away from something.

This is the conversation I won’t remember. This is the roommate I met once. This is how I bite off more than I can chew, leave my head sick drone buzzing for days. This is under water for longer than the memory of breathing; this is dressing myself in heavy. This is how I can’t sleep, can’t sleep, can’t sleep but the waking makes the walls wobble.

This is how you lose a day: slowly, slowly, and then all at once.

This is the Walmart parking lot at noon on a Sunday, eating a southwestern chicken wrap. This is what makes a chicken wrap southwestern: chipotle ranch. My phone provides the ambience while I worry vaguely about data usage and rates. In the front seat. Infant caps, infant socks. This is Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? while Stars takes me to the riot and nothing feels real.

This is a room full of women. A safe place for words like “breast pump” and “vaginal tearing”. This is babies in ice cubes and inducing labor. This is three beers later. Raspberry cake, and It’s a boy! Thick yellow icing and discarded wrapping paper. This is bruschetta and exhaustion heavy in the belly.

This is poetry: an empty room and my too loud voice begging you Love me. You, stranger. You, friend. You, soul of my soul. This is tequila in a bloom of orange peel.  

This is how it ends. The not yet but maybe. The stretching into tomorrow. The waking, and waking, and waking of every day. This is how it ends.

-b