she says

another unfinished something…

She said, you just need to find your people.

Like it’s easy, like everyone is small and swift and blue-eyed. She who collected and cared who glowed with some human moth-light and drew them around her.

Her, not even the first of so many, her, my small world my sharp angel. She preceded me, at least, and never looked back.

I walk backward, catching beauty in hindsight.

Here everything’s clearer, I take pieces and weave them together, build myself baskets to rest in, tying themselves to one another so I can hop through them at will, colors on colors, greens and grays and whole outfits of blue. I cherry-pick and rifle through closets, flouncing through cobblestoned streets in ill-fitting lace. I drive through a green haze of bear and bird calls, drinking foamy coffee after foamy coffee with buttery scones that I can’t afford, financially or emotionally. I play the roles I want to play, those I’m expected to play, those that they dictate to me with the clean cruelty of the wronged.

She said, look around, look for the match, the matches, those who see you as you come.

They chirp and meditate, mop in hand; she can make plants grow.

She speaks softly in paper packaging, water and pigment, all crisp cotton and rooftop views.

She’s judge, jury and the kindest executioner a woman could want, an end in eager smiles, raised eyebrows and unfounded estimates of time.

She loudly proclaims her views on the world, aggressively touts tolerance while you watch the iftar, wine in hand. Scoffs and sneers and you’re left to the side, watching her fearless walk through the crowd. She’s here and gone again, on the tram, through the millions of stories on Instagram, you’re left behind, or ahead, some place you don’t know because you left your compass in her care.

She unpacks. She labors each point, catching the space between expectation and reality in so many words. She speaks, softly, in clichés or clinical terms, whichever. She stays, one toe drifting in the water that crosses the line… 

She rides confident over the handlebars, she takes the pack by the reins and you follow, you follow her wherever. She paints you shades of yellow and green, mocks you for it and hands you the clothes off her back, speaking in rough tones, sometimes nonsense sometimes truths so simple you’d never think to argue. She brings you where you want to be, where she wants you to be, and you’re her people but she’ll never be yours.

She leads them, in secondhand cottons, fox by her side, the people who don’t think you’re different than you are.