The breasty, German woman’s doll-faced daughter pooped in her underwear, wriggling out of her trousers in order to liberate the smelly lump. She complicated our efforts to find peace, toying with the delicate afternoon atmosphere as if it were one of her pot-bellied four year old friends. She paraded through the garden where posh British families dined on lemon tarts more yellow than their hair and less sour than their expressions. Oblivious, the German doll tottered by, her squeals threatening to shred their conversations of parties, politics and Paris. I watched in amusement as the plump, shiny-faced dissenter refused to conform, sloshing water, milk and coffee, so that each liquid uncurled like my curiosity, temporarily staining skirts and shoes, permanently staining our reputations--this motley crew of four--who never could, and never would, stride through the ostentatious door of showy social gatherings--where verbal exchange occurs less between people and more between their expensive commodities.

I remember the quiet garden where the rabbits slept. A dying tree’s slow decay attracted swirls of summer flies--plump and iridescent like the black cherries on which they often feasted. The rotting-water smell provoked my Discomfort, until he finally snapped open two yellow-pink eyes and growled awake. While circling the garden--bare-footed and barren-minded--I sometimes was awoken from my thick, liquid trances by a pale thread of sunlight. The light, so foreign to a garden shrouded completely in an unctuous shade, extracted my sympathy, and I once even invited it to soothe my naked shoulders, which were roughened by several hundred goose-bumps. Within the sunlight’s silver womb I uncovered my dreams. They fluttered forth, colorful and bright-eyed, their lips cracked with widening smiles while I grimly acknowledged their presence. After all, they rekindled in me the same robust, scarlet fire that long ago nourished my graying health…I could never forgive myself for once letting them go, for once commanding them to leave.

I filled my mouth with answers of you:

your whereabouts,

your recent girlfriends.

They commanded these responses from me,

without stopping to

acknowledge that I may not know the answers, either, that I was just as afraid of losing you, and that you had left one cold, blue morning while the birds pecked apart the morning silence with their practiced melodies. I am not one for leaving lovers half-frozen in bed, one leg draped over the mattress--this one eager to leave, to urge you to stay--and the other leg, still warm with a long sleep, desperate to never abandon its safe place beneath the thick sheets, inside the small home.

I remember orange afternoons, kites colored like lollipops, we bared our arms for the warm weather, felt the itchy grass, felt the love of one thousand years. I remember plump water balloons, the hot, milky nights, cradling a tea-cup, cradling your heart for it existed in mine. I remember worrying about everything and nothing at all, drifting bare-feet through the grass. I remember you rubbing my dome-shaped mosquito bites, soothing me into sleep so that I would not awake crying, howling your name, scratching my eyelids purple. I remember how quickly those afternoons melted into night, how quickly the sun, like an apricot seed, slipped out of sight, slipped out of sight. Though I am much older now and possess many worries, many real problems that require tending, nurturing, banishing, I still think back to those days, or perhaps think forward, because it is I who have moved back, it is this that is backwards, this painful regression, I am strangled by things, by empty, hollow things, I am suffocating underneath the unnecessary pressure of chores, obligations, doings, I no longer live, but exist, I am a soulless, smile-less human doing.

Long before I threw myself to you the orange birds produced quick melodies with their purple tongues. I felt like a small girl, observing them while many important situations unraveled before me, situations I had nothing at all to do with. For example, the first female British prime minister was appointed. I squinted hard at her picture, she seemed to have accomplished so many things. The newsman mumbled for an entire hour just listing all that she had witnessed in her life, all that she had contributed and all that she had been a part of. People like her made me feel painfully small. They made me feel like there was something wrong with sitting idle, cross-legged, clawing through trash, observing birds, counting freckles, chasing sheep. I felt rather odd, spinning my separate lies, feasting on fetid fantasies, dozing in damp basements, peeling warm, mushy tangerines. What would I have done?

In another life, years from now, after we traversed the boundaries separating life from death, I might find you reading the newspaper in a yellow room that smells sweet like honey-swirled-tea or delicate scones that crumble with a baby’s touch. Someday, years from now, you will re-exist to blend backwards in time like the moon shaped cookies they piled on plates we painted those very afternoons before you left, those orange afternoons when the sun stopped for a moment longer and illuminated our stooped figures, illuminated our deep concentration. I needed to say goodbye. I could not simply wait behind the door until the car’s short gasps faded, I could not simply stand biting my fingernails with tears breaking free and plummeting forth. Instead I ran. I ran many, many minutes to you, I secured my arms around your fragile waist like a rope, I wanted to learn your body’s complicated grooves and lines, I wanted to relearn them and memorize them. The years have passed, and how quickly they rustled by, I feel much older than I did those days, I feel my hair beginning to fade, beginning to lose its color, beginning to turn frosty-white like the lilies you once set upon my work table, as if to haul me towards you, as if I was skipping out of reach. It seems we are forever lost, until I separate myself from life and perhaps as another being will find you reading the newspaper in a yellow room that smells sweet like honey-swirled-tea.