Lemonade

Hold up
They don't love you like I
love
you.

The night ran too long, the wine list ran too long, bottles overturned and conversation a mile a minute to catch up on a year's friendship lost to social norms and silence. How sweet a honeymoon, how sweet a pat on the head, how sweet this drink at what should have been the end of the evening and why don't we have another. My mother calls and says I'm leaving my country and you've been putting off the process for 26 years so maybe it's just as well to scrape the last of this bandaid off and move on. Fill a suitcase with your grandmother's heirlooms and coffee beans, things you don't know if they'll have in the new land, a hundred years ago a million of your people left and never came back, left to make a better life, how are you any different? You've had stars in your eyes since you were a child, why would you settle for anything less than a
fairytale.