Pearl

My parents think I'm never getting married, so they've started just giving me the heirlooms now. We laugh, but the world races ahead around us, years fall like petals from our eyelashes as we sit locked in ivory towers watching our hair grow. A caramel sauce turns golden under my watch, how fragile the crystals, how quickly everything turns to ash. She writes to say she's coming into the city and can we stare at each other from afar? Everything is a trembling ask. We all need a refill.

A deadline runs toward me. I never met a deadline I didn't like, in the end, when it wriggled under my boot heel. The days are long but the life is short and there aren't enough deadlines to make you actually live it on your own. They still ask about you. He's so good to me, she says into the 6-foot space between us. Seven years and I haven't yet dared say out loud that I don't deserve him.

Years fall like petals, our deepest dreams like sand through our closed fists, we cannot protect ourselves against the sweeping currents of the world, we are pawns and all the world is a strange game, what do we know but here, and now, and maybe a little of what it is to love? My thoughts scatter across the avenues. Summer lies in wait. We'll get where we're going,

I think.