(1)

Hey it’s me.

It’s Friday the 13th, 2020,

6:51 pm, Eastern Standard Time.

Here I am, sitting on the floor

in my bedroom, in Brooklyn,(one short block from Prospect Park)

There’s an owl outside my window,

Or perhaps not an owl, another kind of bird,

A melodic refrain, repeating, repeating, repeating

A nonchalant melancholia

So,

So I think of you. 

I think of you most days.

Are you awake? 

It’s been a minute

I can’t recall your face,

Or the sound of your voice

I don’t remember your name

We never said our names, did we?

We never said anything to each other.

Are you awake? 

If you look out your window, what do you see?

I was looking at the glaciers just a little while ago, and now there’s

Tectonic plates, rolling mountains,

a shallow stream slashing through an endless field

A man and his dog, taking a stroll across the entire world

A sunset; it’s the color of violence

I’ve been thinking of you.

I remember your left ear; it’s slightly higher than your right

I remember that you had a scar on your thumb

Your left thumb, or

Or was it just above your brow, there!

Across the helix of your left ear

Piercing gone wrong, you said

It’s shiny

A slip of skin, of a different texture

Like a stitch in a story I think it was

Sunny

Brooding clouds

Bit of a drizzle

Thunders and lightning

Sunglow

Sunglow so pink it hurts

Musky twilight after a whole day of rain

It was snowing

It was hot

Humid

Windy

Cold

In the middle of a summer that never ended

The day of the solar eclipse

The sky fell midday

I remember the strawberry moon

There were so many stars

There were no stars

No stars

Purple midnight clouds 

I wanted to tell you that your shoelaces had come undone

But I didn’t

I didn’t want to be strange

I didn’t want to be a stranger who talked to you

When you don’t talk to strangers

You don’t talk to strangers

You don’t talk to strangers with headphones in,

Humming a song you happened to know every word of

You don’t talk to strangers on trains, half asleep,

Strangers in the park, strolling across the park holding the leash of a dog

You desperately wanted to pet that dog, but you didn’t

You don’t talk to strangers who might’ve been a mentor, a lover, a sister, a new member of your very own, very peculiar family of odd people

Because nothing’s scarier than the possibility of intimacy 

(2) 

I read about this a long time ago in the Reader’s Digest

It may or may not be true, but it’s stayed with me.

It was during the gold rush in the late 19th century, in New Zealand’s South Island. One day, local theology student William Rigney was walking by a stream when he found a shivering dog standing over a slumped figure; it turned out to be the body of a handsome young man. So Rigney buried the body, and inscribed on the tombstone:“Somebody’s darling lies buried here.”Years later when Rigney passed away himself, he was buried next to that grave, and the headstone reads:

“The man who buried somebody’s darling.”

Find out more about the previous installments: