Half Lives

It’s October in south Louisiana,

though you’d never know it from the

thickness in the air.

We’re sixteen, and this park

isn’t the kind of place

we should be after dark,

but you’re here,

and for the first time, it’s just us.

You help me down the crumbling bank

above some sad excuse for a stream,

black water holding wrappers, bottle caps,

the small wreckage

of other people’s evenings.

Shadows move at the edge of the park,

shapes slipping between the trees,

less frightening

than the heat between our sweating palms.

The mosquitoes find us.

I’m wearing that Nirvana shirt

that gave us something to say to each other.

The night closes around us without cooling.

Nothing here knows

how to become autumn.

Already the world seems to be thinning

into images, single lines,

proof that something happened.

But this belongs only to us—

this small, unrecorded moment.

It’s October again in south Louisiana

and I still look for you crossing campus

on that stupid bike.

The live oaks lean lower each year,

their limbs nearly touching the ground.

I text the college radio station

where you work

and request songs I hope you’ll understand,

knowing you won’t know they’re from me.

I was the one who ended

something that had never quite begun.

I wanted the clean mercy of a decision—

something with edges.

But it doesn’t quite kill a thing bent on

existing.

Soon I will move across the country,

trusting distance to make something final.

We don’t talk anymore, so I never tell you,

and so perhaps some part of me

will still catch your eye across a sidewalk,

wearing my shape after I am gone.

A decade settles quietly into our skin.

A radio room burning late.

Black water beneath a footbridge.

A song with less of a destination.

It’s late October

and I find myself in south Louisiana again.

I wouldn’t normally cross the country,

leave him and her behind

for some dumb reunion,

but the air is still thick when I step outside,

and you are here.

Older in all the ordinary ways.

So am I.

I don’t listen to Nirvana anymore,

but for the first time in years

we are alone together,

and something in the dark

rearranges itself around us.

Somewhere, the bank is still whole.

The park keeps its heat.

Windows burn and go dim.

October moves through all of it

like a room left open.

The place holds more of us than it should.

Two shadows haunt a park sidewalk

broken up by the roots of live oaks,

strange figures surrounded by the air

of something that will never quite arrive.

A residual melody of a song

that once meant more than its lyrics

reaches someone’s head.

A light occasionally flickers

in a seemingly empty room.

Nothing stays long enough

to become anyone,

but the land here

is too saturated with memory

to let them leave.

Sometimes I wonder if the shape of you

that still lingers within me,

despite the years and how little of it

ever became anything at all,

belongs to some version of us

holding each other somewhere out here

in ever-suspended autumn—

one version of us

amidst all these little half lives,

where a different ending is still beginning.