Maybe It’s His First Time Around

Awake in sunshine. Walk past the apartment where you used to live, ride a tram past the school where you became who you are, it’s all been too long and you don’t feel a thing. Ring a doorbell to an unknown home but find the hearts within beating like you’ve never not known them. Have you seen what they’ve done to our pasta factory, they say, and New York reappears behind your eyelids like a spectre.

The sun carries on. We take the tram to the ferry, walk to the end of the island until we see only water on the horizon. I dive right in and take long strokes in the clear blue until the dog swims out to corral me: she’s only trying to protect her flock, so I let her. Everything is magic, I breathe a steady rhythm. You should be here, I have time to think before the ferry picks us back up and our skin glows with summer. We sit in their window, later, smoking cigarettes into the sunset and singing blues songs like we had seen heartache only in pictures. The apartment is white, designed, old and new at once, you sink into your heritage. Back home there’s a heat advisory. I sleep with the windows open and try to hear the city outside. If I listen carefully enough, perhaps it’ll whisper the answer.

I fall asleep before it has a chance to.
Wonder if I’d even recognize it if it did.