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There was nothing I used to love more than a sleeping bag, completely unzipped, spread out in the grass. Because when I saw that, I knew I would spend the night beneath the stars and in your arms, cuddling closer when the wind moved around us, smelling the perfume on your neck mix with the summer night air. There was one spot behind your ear where you smelled so perfect on those nights. I wanted to bottle the scent and keep it forever.
When the weather turned cold and white flakes started falling, we took the sleeping bag inside and lit a fire in our ineffective fireplace. There was a window in your living room that looked right over to another building, but when it snowed we could huddle together under the sleeping bag and watch the world slow, and then stop. The city that was always full of noise would finally be quiet, the only sound the occasional slow passing of a car. When the snow stopped we would read, or make love, or sleep. Nothing to break the silence that had fallen.
Earlier than the snow, when leaves started turning different colors and dropping from trees, you wore your favorite boots and would go out of your way to hear the crunch underfoot. If we returned to your home upstate, visited your brother still in high school and your weary mother, I would volunteer to rake leaf piles and you would jump into them, throw handfuls of it at me until I retaliated by tickling you until you cried with laughter. We would go inside to a turkey too big for four people, a bowl of mashed potatoes too heavy for one person to carry, a pile of stuffing that you made you full just looking at it. Our cheeks would be red with cold and we would hold hands under the table, no matter how difficult it made eating, and your mother would send us adoring and knowing looks.
The last part of the year I still will not speak of. How your favorite color of flower was red and you would come home with seas of tulips that you put all over your apartment, finding spots for seven different vases. How your hair got lighter and lighter until you were completely blonde, and how I would make the same blonde jokes over and over just to see you roll your eyes and try to not laugh.
I don't like to speak of that time. That time when the red tulips blurred before my eyes. When your blonde hair came towards me and I pushed you away, in pain, unknowing. When you told me that I was not the only one who knew that you liked your coffee with lots of sugar but no cream, I was not the only one who knew that verses could be written on the skin of your back about your beauty and our love.
Try as I might, I have still not found a way to leave you and your seasons. Your rituals and traditions. And the things that did not change: the way you spoke as if every minute could be wasted, the way you walked as though you held the world in your back pocket and could take it out when you liked. There is no remedy for the memories of these things.
Upon my lips you laid a blessing.
Upon my heart you left a curse.
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