On This Time Of Year

When I talk to you, all I here is the rattle of what we are not saying. There are big mustard flowered fields between the gaps of our words. You now live in a place I’ve never seen, and I imagine her bare feet on your kitchen floor. 

At the store I roll the paper leafed tomatillos between my sticky fingers and run through a list in my head. I can’t make out what anyone else is saying and it makes me feel invisible, like not speaking the language makes me not count. When I am writing this I am twenty-seven and the winter isn’t here yet, and we’re drinking cheap wine from the drug store across the street. Sometimes we go back for a second bottle. 

What I cannot know at twenty-seven surprises me at 31. But isn’t that the way it’s supposed to go. 

In a small bakery that serves thing finger deep pies with flies in the window and a woman behind the counter with her nails painted, we buy a jam latticed pie and decide to eat it for lunch. In this part of my life we do things like that, drive along the sea in Italy and eat finger deep pies for lunch in a rental car. 

I try my best to make a point quickly, to put the tomatillos in the bag one by one, but you’re speaking Spanish to a woman and I’m alone again. I’ve been censoring myself again lately and I don’t think that’s a good sign for the writing or for the life. People I don’t even know tell me how to get it done, hot to stay in the room, crawl through the mud, make the most out of day. To not keep the company of those who censor you or lead you to censor yourself. 

For some reason I cannot stop thinking about her in your car, and you driving and where you might have gone, and how when I was in the car I knew this was going to happen and yet at twenty-seven, I couldn’t have imagined any of it. 

This time of year always makes me feel strange. I find myself staring at the way leaves split, and looking up terrible things, and wondering how many almonds I could survive on. I think there is merit in the gaze and I think there is danger in going on like this. But, we’re not in the car anymore and that means something too.