I am approximately one hundred thousand miles and a day away from any semblence of perfection, I bumble and stumble and what I can't mask with eloquence I hide from, have been hiding, have created a warren of hideouts and quick feints. What I can't throw up I keep down, down, down, deep down, there beneath the bile, hidden under the gall stones, my rattling and persistent secrets, my sovreign and scarlet haints of shame, gargling around down there, to the left and just above my ovaries, showing up unbidden in a private conversation late at night when I am helpless at the wheel and the fanfare on independence day is writ across the sky from valley town to valley town, the engineer and trapped in the limbo between the cooling 4th of july sky and my dark car and the a/c spilling at our wrists and ankles.

How did I get here.

How am I spilling secrets when the sky is exploding in flower and fire, my eyes are hot and wet, I cleave to the steering wheel and take the wrong exit, I've got one eye peeled on the brake lights and one eye on what I am leaving behind, I should reach out to him, but I am busy being pre-occupied and willfully deaf, I am already busy in the immediate future, the one where we still make out at light's out and fall asleep holding hands, I am already so far in the future that I am mourning our passing, and I keep driving and you're still next to me.

I guess I had forgotten this part, when I become less lovely and more fallible, when I, having said that and having said this, and am aching to find the solace of peaceable vacant sheets want him anyway, if only for his presence in my pyjama bottoms. There was a point earlier this evening when I was evaluating my losses, when I was prepared to cut and run, having exposed my fragile underbelly, I was prepared for a hot bath and a long cry. And then he called again, with a researched peace of advice and a battery of support.

And I had forgotten that part. That tenuous, momentous, sweetness of your lover reaching out past the nighttime flares of fireworks in other towns and tied to a westbound freeway, reaching out with a bit of abolution, reaching out with a half nibbled carrot and an afternoon of torpid sex beneath a blighted July sky, there by the river, there down by the river, down by the river holding our breath in the deep emerald and throwing rocks at rocks, deep in the river where dreams are fed.

I'll meet you there, there deep in the river, deep in the green, with the birds of prey and the bats and the hummingbirds, because that is where I breathe the best.