Daffodil

The park is awash with Sunday afternoon perfection. Not a boat left to be rented, and the sunny side of the bridges are all selfies and bridal portraits, and look at that squirrel, how cute. She calls to tell of a tumultous Saturday too long in the making, and how sweet a Sunday morning when the company is right. I still wonder what your voice sounds like on Sunday morning, I've forgotten even its late night timbre. Perhaps it is just as well. I can't hear the words without hearing something else now. Her eyes glitter when she speaks. Age makes us cautious, but we are all teenagers at heart. I want to tell him I'll break his knees if he hurts her. Perhaps there'll be time for it yet.

Crawl into the bookstore at 82nd and Broadway, the escalator is broken, it has that right smell of coffee and carpet, dysmal lighting, the upper west side always had too many people in it and I never liked the way they felt against my skin. In the far corner, find the book, I wasn't going to stay but I'll sit for a little bit, rows of chairs, my bare legs stick against the plastic, turn a page and disappear. It dug its way in, like a thorn, like barbed wire and suddenly I'm crying in the bookstore, in the flourescent tube lighting, in the far corner of the upper west side and a hundred people I'll never look in the eyes, it doesn't matter. Sometimes I fear we are too broken, that this gash was deeper than we could ever have imagined, and we'll never recover after all. He says I envy you being there so much and it angers me. People say this a hundred times over and never go, always dream, fold themselves into their fears and excuses and grow bitter at the News Feed in front of them. If my shell of a person can do it, so can you. I am only amazing.

I am only hollow on the inside.