Looking down, I can see everything that comprises your little town, this sacred place in your formation where you have been born and martyred and raised again. There is the bookstore-coffeeshop where we drink our tea and peer out the window at the feet of the passersby. Across the loathsome football field is the high school where you fell into love and its entailing poverty. Your ex-girlfriend, we speak of her while we attempt locked doors and try to climb through windows. We're looking for a way in. But your hallways are barred to us, so we wander slowly back down the paths that brought us.
On the corner is the skate shop, boys with shaggy curls out front doing tricks. I see you tense. "That one looks like Johnny, I thought he was in Texas. He does jumps just like him, oh, I can't see him! Can I stand behind you, will you block me from his view til he goes back inside."
"Babe, it's not him, there's no way it's him. I just saw his face, and it's not him."
You recover. You tell me about your deaf boy, that he taught you to sign and how he smiled just for you. Sometimes, you say, he'd put his hands over yours to keep you from speaking so he could look at your eyes. Those were the times you were most in love.
You tell me how he brought you up five stories to this same parking garage, the first time you'd been. The mountains. The church steeple. The place where he scratched your initials into the rail.
I watch the clouds pass. I examine your face, which is never far from grinning. I find such impossible beauty wherever I turn.
