Your Time My Doctor

It feels like family to be in the car with you. Wondering if the art world is really a better place than the Safeway and the Subaru.

8 am, raining and rightly so because what is passing is a prism. Our world is new still and wet with nourishment.

I have fought myself into a whole new person, but sitting in my lap behind the wheel, cruising, is me when we met at five years old, and sitting your lap is you, 5 as well, just as much vision, never needing glasses, shotgun in the passenger side.

Out you look, taking stock of what surrounds you.

been like, been here before but not with you so it’s new

And we laugh the laugh of kindergarten, and first grade, second through fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, high, college, living in the rollicking wave.

Belly full of breath, it doesn’t matter who is driving and how long we have been apart and what the way of it all will be. A chosen staying in the midst of moving.

I drop you and bags and your boyfriend too and I know he’ll love you forever as your husband but still not like I love you.

High threshold nomad, and I’m glad to see me go, all for the sake of knowing what I don’t know.

Merging, radio off. Culture gives me a headache, psychological warfare like my cousin says tiktok is, something insidious, kid’s a whiz.

But now the dog is sleeping on the couch to Sonny Rollins,

and I am in love with the still,

forgotten fully that I used to dress to kill.

Branching out by tracing the window where the real branches are twine hands spun in a fire red and corn thread gold,

each holding an orb of resting rain that futures could be seen in without moving from your couch where I write about how you’ve fallen in love for the first and last time.

What we have lived so far together

stretches out behind us now,

a bounty of giving and receiving

of building trust and recalling knowing.

I must use my softest voice and be my softest self with the tiny precious life. I practice on my beloved when they are sick and crying, unsure of if they don’t love me and don’t want to admit it, or if they do love me and are afraid.

I was afraid of love really until I looked again at this unending thing, and considered that there was nothing which could comfort me more. Our love a ripple of laughs transcending ten years, an open window, and the white lines of a soccer field.

What intuition we had to chat at nap time, worth the scolding, now always holding space for the grace of your medical attention.