On The Oranges

There is an orange tree outside and you tell me that, I have never noticed it. But, it’s right outside the window and their pops of color seem to me to have preordained this conversation. Everything feels gestational right now, egging, coming out of something else. I am in a stilled kind of awe starring out the window. 

I was walking around for a little bit with a heavy layer of worry that something was about to fall apart, someone I love drop dead. But, it’s eased now, burned off like the beach fog and I am trying to see more, again.  

I long for our painted white table and the walks around the neighborhood and feeling so much you could leech it off me just standing in line. I don’t write like that right now. I can’t bottle it up and I don’t see all the colors. He tell me on the phone, I spent a decade thinking it was a problem and it wasn’t. It’s only a thing if I make it a thing and I don’t have another decade to get over this. 

I say it’s in the desert and I go wandering there like searching for water in a place where it doesn’t flow. I say it’s in staying home, so I make roots quickly and climb the fence. I say it’s in the space so I try five. Is it so much to want to be bowled over by it all, to be swallowed and shrunken by the grandness of the world?

I woke up yesterday so swimming in thoughts of you I was angry. In my dream you pushed my face against the mirror and told me to lick it. In real life, we hardly speak. I am open to memories like I wasn’t before and they come floating in that open kitchen window past the orange tree: him and I at the fish market in Seattle buying lavender, the afternoon he tattooed a bird on his ankle, a breakfast in Canada, driving the 5, smoke like oil in water in a shaft of light early in the afternoon, and not much else. I get all of those. I keep them in my pocket and then put them on the shelf. 

It’s raining in the Caribbean and it’s sunny in California. Someone at the grocery store asked if I still play music. I am worried there is more I am not going to get, like those oranges outside the kitchen window. Worried I’ll forget about that life entirely, and the white table, and those walks, and how it rained so hard in the spring it rattled the house. I would have never not seen the oranges back then.