on howling

echo.

I could tell you about how I went through each drawer, one by one, and held up shirts and tank tops and tops with bras sewn into torsos and how I kept one of your undershirts from back when we were in high school tucked away in a corner for all these years. It moved with me a million times. I could tell you how, in high school, I’d sneak out just to sleep in your bed for a few hours in the middle of the night. I could tell you how we barely touched back then and how we now sleep in the same bed. How that old shirt is filled with holes, and your torso now, like it was back then, is full of muscles. I could tell you how holes can make their way into anything.

I could tell you about the abandoned tunnels I walked through and how ghosts don’t need fancy, almost derogatory, names like paranormal. They are like fossils - life trapped in sap so we can remember what it was like before so much time passed over and across us. So we can remember. How remembering is the proton to forgetting’s electron. In nature, you can find the ouroboros in everything.

I could tell you about the conversation I had with you over the phone in my car in the driveway. How you weren’t home either, but I stayed outside. How I call it a conversation, but our voices were raised, and I kept imagining getting out of the car and peeling off the paint chipping on our garage, like I might strip everything away to see what’s really there beneath it all.

I could tell you how I let Luna ride in the front seat after we dropped off Rafi this morning for two blocks, until we decided it was safer for her to ride in the back seat. So at a stoplight, she climbed back and buckled up before the light turned green.

I could tell you that the windchimes Megan gave me for my birthday are as close to a soundbath as I’ve experienced since the time we laid on the ground surrounded by crystal bowls and flameless candles to not celebrate — no we did not celebrate — but commemorate, one of the anniversaries we’ve traversed in this time lined with them. Defined by them. Like streets or dust or starlight or sand in your bathing suit after swimming in the ocean, the anniversaries were everywhere.

I could tell you that on this new moon, I don’t expect that the coyotes will make a mockery of midnight the way they do for full moons, but I could be wrong.

I could tell you that I am working away at something, as one does, and you can barely tell by looking at me that I am doing anything at all.

I could tell you how a poet left their body last week and leaves behind a great place where words collect like weather patterns above us all; look up and see for yourself.

I could tell you about cancer and how, when it enters your life, nothing goes untouched, and how wild it is to try and find shelter in a place in which there is no way to seal the door shut.

I could tell you that I finally figured out what prayer is, and it has something to do with wind.