I love you, alive girl

June 22nd / June 23rd

A night will go on without notice, or as a backdrop for more absorbing things, until it is day. One hour you are dancing with a boy whose face is a smudge, whose voice is a ghost, and the next you are hand in hand with him walking into a light you did not see arriving. The men are setting up their food stalls. The slim business girls take their early runs. The heat is still tempered by the evening rains, so that the air is cool where it wicks your skin—shoulders, ribs, wrist. Where it can’t touch is where he holds you. 

You would like to miss time more often. You keep a casual air with all your lovers that does not betray how much of your life you have wasted worrying about the future. The good thing is that there is still much left to waste. 

Drinks you frowned at go down easier these days. You want to be a girl who knows herself, so you drink only wine and gin cocktails where you can get them. Everything is another twenty dollars. Hair you straightened for a semblance of order returns to curl in the wet heat. You love it, though you wish it said less about you. 

It is a relief that the same things make you cry two years later. 

Return to your haunts: the bookshop, the wine bar, the pastry stall. Kiss the pretty girls with their frosted glasses and cherry-red loafers. Have another ice cream with the book you will never finish, just to keep something from ending. 

You still listen to the playlist you made when you were 12, in bed or at work or walking the wet streets home. 13,000 people listen to the playlist you made when you were 12. One of them could be walking these same streets, half in love with the metronome of their heels, pleased with what a few strings can make of a silence. 

It touched you once to be recognized by so many people with no obligations toward you. Now it worries you to be known. You have bad habits; you do not think of things that happen to you as precious enough to keep secret. You would like to be false, but really you are begging someone to take the full measure of you and deliver a verdict. 

When the trains change tracks without warning, you find you prefer walking, which relies on the body, whose limits you are still learning. 

In a strange city you might meet a friend you knew for a very long time, or a very long time ago, and it is like meeting an arm or a hand you dropped along the way. This is your young limb, which still remembers the newness of your first swim, your first golf swing, your first apple picking. Take it out for drinks; teach it to shave or to hit. Here, it can shake, it can make shadow puppets still. How lovely it is to pick it up after all this time, and to find that it still fits.