Carried under my heart

Last evening before the thunder storm, I walked in the rich, humid air along the street's green median and found a tree with giant, soft leaves. I held my chin to the leaf and felt its veins, just perhaps as you lifted your chin from your chest for the first time.

On my walk, I picked which flowers I would like to steal, coming back at midnight when it would be raining: the dark pink peonies along a brick apartment, their blooms sweet, heavy, hidden, and low; the deep purple irises along the edge of the public road, beaten down by a dog breaking their stems; and the fairy pink roses along the dorm the college kids blissfully ignore. Let this be your first lesson: gather only neglected flowers.

But instead at midnight I washed dishes, scrapping flecks of scrabbled egg from a black frying pan. My fingernails growing longer from the vitamins, while yours take their first shape and scrape the thick liquid of your dark world.

At times I think of that world as silent, but you're really immersed in sound: the whooshing of my blood, the rumbling of our mutual dinner digesting, the steady beating of my heart on the roof above you, like the rain above me, and the waves of my voice, laughing, talking, or crying, raw sound reverberating through my bones. All evidence disclosing our continuity amid discreteness.