I'll Come Around

Anxiety today like the coffee shop days, sipping aloud, for warmth in the cold surround, sounds of streetlamps sighing compressed by the glass, drowned out by James brown on the jukebox, good god, teasing quarters out of pockets for TLC and R. Kelley, Al Green and Elvis, and the air smells honey brown. We walk briskly in from the car, and I hold the first door open while you wait holding the second, and we both walk in together, sit side by side in the booth together, I smile I shake your shivers off your shoulders.

We grew up in diners, publicly private, between orders of coffee and fried apple pie. I sussed out myself over hashbrowns and scrambled eggs, white toast golden glowing yellow with butter, dripping, and I associate wondering with maple syrup in small glass pitcher, etched with a woodland pattern, perhaps dutch.

And some months later we sat across from each other and you stopped using cream.

I don't really go to diners much anymore. For a while it was too smoky, and now I can't stand the grease. It never was the food that brought me there, but now it seems to be the reason I stay away. But, you've also been gone, and I'm not so encumbered with searching these days; I stroll with curious interest through the forest, but I no longer feel so lost, so terrified of the shadier parts - I sit for hours in the wilder patches some afternoons and notice sun broken into soft circles by small yellow leaves, their branches dissecting the sky, pulling apart clouds into tufts of white cotton candy stretched out in strands across the atmosphere, and I know below is a world I will never know, under the leaves, inside the dirt, across the what must seem endless horizon encompassing the shadow under my feet there are centuries of history, and I will only know it for an afternoon, a few hours before class, and I'll trample off to unknown worlds several feet at a time, beyond the imagination of the shadow organisms, spoken of in hushed awe, for millenia.