We used to meet here on Saturday mornings and listen to the burnt edges of sunrise
together. His knuckles were painted red whenever I cared to notice; he never bothered to
make a hard-edged excuse. I would look at the grass a second later, anyway, and allow it to
grow before my eyes. The air wasn’t heavy with accusation on those mornings – we made
space for each other, and then some. Occasionally I found myself wishing I knew which
words hung themselves on the breeze between us.
     Today is a Wednesday. He was the one, surprisingly, who reached out, smeared
unkind fingers on my windowsill before the day cared enough to start. The note he left read
old place. after school. me and you, like always. His scrawl was unmistakable, the paper
curled in on itself just how my stomach tended to.
     I’m clued into his presence when the wattle branch shakes somewhere above me.
Fragmented pale yellow whispers downward. My nose tickles. Our palms turn in lazy
motions, a handshake older than the both of us combined. For a second, it’s all okay. We’re
twelve again, boyish smiles elbowing themselves to the front.
     Folding his arms and six foot three against the rutted wooden wall, I begin to see the
lines of stress his mother traced on his forehead. Crow’s feet lie forgotten on his cheekbones.
I wonder if he’s used them since she left him. I pinch his hoodie, find a hole in it
immediately. The touch doesn’t startle him, quite, but there’s an unexpected wistfulness still.
     “I just –” he kicks at dirt. Forget-me-nots discard themselves at his feet – I consider
their curtsies. Royalty would suit him, I think. His dark brows and angled eyes call for gold
and mockery.
     “She was so much to me, you know?”
     Twisting rhythms always entranced her, compelled her to sway in godly fashion and –
yes, I did know. She was the everything old poets dreamt about, but she had some fire. Rough
edges. I never liked her smell of smoke in the woods.
     “Yeah,” I say. I think I’m nodding.
     He pauses. Shifts. Glowers at the horizon. As much as he tries, he could never hate
the sky as much as she did.

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​     Two sunrises later, we’re back again. This time it’s me feeling the ocean; a
misunderstanding at home. A wine glass calling to be shattered. The small of my back
pressed into the stove as I tried to tell my eyes nothing was happening. 
     “I just –” I swallow. His eyes are shadowed, bruised too blue for the morning. I could
ignore this, but he’s listening. “They should be more to me. You know?”
     “Yeah,” he says, softer than I’ve ever known.
     I trace an x on the concrete and pretend not to hear him breaking. A word sticks in his
throat. Sadness lends itself to me.
     “Yes?” I say.
     There’s no answer. He’s not ready to shoulder my hurt against his own, I know that.
Some part of me longs for it to be different. For me to be able to collapse against the ground
with no repercussion, no half-caring hand of his stopping me partway through. This
disconnect is one of my childhood and I – one of him and her. There’s too many parallels to
be drawn, and we’re both too tired of the silence to embrace it. So, we don’t.
     I knock my head back on the wood and let him walk away. When his heart breaks
again, he’ll come running, but for now I let the taste of the risen sun embitter me.