Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Let the moment be where Annie finds herself, not because she's lost but because she's been looking and when Aram calls because she was meeting with her boss and he remembers not one but both meetings and worries that she's weary and she is, Annie tells herself that it isn't only love that looks like this but some days when there's not a cupcake on the horizon, no good song, no time to read the body of books that she sleeps beside each night, she thinks it really is. Let the moment be Liza on the line talking about lost boys as dead horses, the kind heavy when they live, heavier when they die, their bodies the stuff of breaking the barn down around them, just to hire the back-hoe and dig a grave, larger than most of the places where she has lived. There is no quiet way for a lost boy to leave you, Liza says as she laments her own, the one who forgets to brush his teeth and won't floss for anything, the one who drinks himself to sleep most nights and dreams through the alarm because he didn't protect his ears against the years of truck-tinkerings so loud they blew out whole octaves and now it's hard to call him indoors when night is falling and dinner is still warm. They are tired, Liza and Anastasia, though Liza has made a home with her man and Annie some nights feels like a single dandelion seed pirouetting ever-away from the pod, and so portable it's as if the flight was what she was made for.

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