I sat on your lap in the driver’s seat after you told me to close the door. After you had pulled me to you and kissed me, the interior light turning our clandestine destiny into a show. In the dark I asked why one tooth was longer than the other. If I held the secret to that I held the secret to everything. You fell off your bike and chipped it when you were eight. In this story you are the secret. You are everything.

*

We walked into the Dutch Mill bar, welcomed by glares. We stayed and created our own world, and in an omen so obvious you held my hand and recited, “The Second Coming.” But we loved the musk melon moon low in the bosom of an October night, and the cold smell of summer’s death, with a passionate intensity. In this story we are the ones rocking the cradle that looses the beast.

*

I am alone at my parents’ house. Outside the wind is ravishing red-leaved trees, bending them backwards, shaking leaves into submission. Clouds march across autumn sky and every doubt is swallowed by sun breaking through the windowpane. I call to see if you can come over, but you are already on the interstate driving seventy-seven miles an hour home. You laugh when I tell you your hair isn’t dishwater, it’s wet sand. The sun is setting, and you tell me about the deer. How they hide in tall grass and jump out on the road. If you see one, there’s always another, waiting. In this story we are the deer.

*

I am mesmerized by March clouds, dark and bruised, even in a bright sky. Two years ago, in England, there were hills and warm hearths, but I still managed to constantly crush eggshells. I was forever in debt to him—the ex—because love was a type of remuneration, and I was grateful for the work. Waiting in the States for a visa I remembered the unencumbered safety of a swept floor. It’s frustrating how he never saw it coming, how he couldn’t fathom that a wet-sand-deer could permanently plant the Atlantic between us. In this story I find out I believe in fate, but fate doesn’t make me a good person.

*

It is April and everything is blurred with rain, and you write me a letter. You can’t believe it’s been over a year. You apologize for disappearing from my life and slickly assume that you’ve held it against yourself more than I have held it against you. Maybe that is true, since all I have held is a light up to each one of my inadequacies. You say when you hear “Tangled Up in Blue” there’s a line that reminds you, strictly, of me. You wrote out the lyrics about meeting a woman when she’s married and helping her out of a jam. You write you hope to see me someday soon.  In this story you think you are Bob Dylan.

*

“Someday soon” comes at the end of summer before you move to Wyoming for a master’s in English and before I move to California in an attempt to make something, anything happen. You come into town. We go out to eat. We go for a drink. At my apartment we don’t take off our clothes. It’s more insidious than that. You hold me, gently, all night. As you sleep my heart continues to break, over and over, like waves at the mouth of a great cavern.