ello, jello

I’m glad I never went looking

Because I’d never find what it was I was searching for. She writes of her father, her mother, the men she almost let love her and the boys she let herself be young with back in school. But there are no words for me. Was the summer we spent not worth writing about? Was the way that her weathered fingers tilted my face toward hers in my car after a night shift at the casino, nothing? The painted rock we found on our first date of a smiling sun, You are my Sunshine, was just a coincidence, I guess. She took me by the hand and pulled me into her story, we were midnight cowboys searching for stars, our sacred desert a witness. I lent her the book that whispered to me you are queer… and she returned it with a series of notes tucked into the front cover. Because she was a writer herself, and she recognized good writing when she saw it. We were on a journey to discover the secrets of the universe. Just the two of us. I held us together so she wouldn’t roll into the dirt on her friend’s swinging porch chair. The dad almost caught us that one time. Almost caught me gazing at her the way I did back then. She threw her head up at the sky after he went back inside and laughed and laughed her heavenly laugh and squeezed me tighter. That summer, amidst the turmoil of a worldwide pandemic, despite never having spent much time at any altar, I understood why my ancestors worshipped the Sun. But I guess she didn’t see what I saw. A thick cloud of smoke settled in the valley the day she left. It filled my house, sunk deep into the upholstery of my dad’s car, was tucked into every book page, and seeped under my eyelids. They were bloodshot and raw for months after that, my eyes were. Scorched, I think, after looking too closely at the sun.