It wasn’t quite summer yet,
so it was one of those beach towns
that was bracing itself for the possibility
of a long season of hopelessness.

The hotel didn’t want us there.
The streets wouldn’t be paved with invisible gold until July.
Children threw rocks from the open windows of borrowed cars.
All that sand on the sidewalk was old, worn out,
and it kept reminding me of a completely different town
that was probably no better or worse than this one.

And the clouds may as well have been overweight, stoned elephants,
with the way they lazily implied all the verbal abuse they were capable of.

And that one snow cone guy probably dreamed
of suicide every half-hour. Or at least of getting back the guys
from the garage band that ruled Leila Street
for six amazing weeks.

But we didn’t try to fill in a single unhappy blank.

We were embarrassingly silly when it rained Saturday afternoon,
but we weren’t being too romantic about things.

There were two or three kisses that kind of grabbed
the idea of time travel,
and turned its spine into a toy railroad track
that eventually gets back to where it started.

I don’t think either of us ever took that mini-golf game seriously.

We were both amazed that I had enough acumen
to put on pants for the indifferent kid who brought our Chinese food.

You’re one of the only ones I’ve ever met who could write
a book about their tattoos that I’d actually want to read.

But we weren’t too romantic.
We didn’t forget that it was the kind of hotel
that was going to have our stuff out on the sidewalk,
Sunday at 11,
but we didn’t exactly talk about it either.

It was good enough to know that we had
a whole weekend at home,
and a whole weekend tucked neatly away
from everything we had gone through separately
over the past couple of years.

It wasn’t something we had to bring up
every time the evening fixed us
into a slow motion sensation.

05/18/2013

Posted on 05/19/2013
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard