Bricks and mortar 

The bricks in the pathway crumble at the corners. I still like them. Is it mortar supposed to be in between? 

I don’t know. 

There’s impossibly green shoots sprouting up amongst them instead. 

I can never blow all the leaves out of the half sunken basement doorwell. The other day, I blew the remnants around myself like an experiment in a science museum: “You can’t get out of orbit like this.” It felt real, like the wind in a movie. 

The dog wants to settle in my lap while I try to meditate. In reflex, I reject him. He retreats and a forced pause turns me into a like of his handsome little head. 

I don’t want to look to the eastward fence. I think it will hurt too much. It does but I don’t register it. My left eye twitches instead. We sat on our pink blankets out there once. When we had just moved in. You commented on the trees. I winced. The day was sunny and spring. I liked it all so intensely: you, our boy in a winter hat, the wild overgrown multitude of trees. 

We pulled weeds in the bed right behind me just yesterday, it seems. It was hot and sweaty work. We were side by side. I wanted to be an organic farmer that day. I didn’t tell you but if I had you would have looked at me and kindly agreed to my ever evolving plans to escape myself. Now, you throw your head back and laugh good naturedly. You tousle my hair. And, I can’t object like I used to. 

I don’t understand where you are now or what this all is supposed to look like. Is there something to do about the crumbling bricks? Is love bigger than the human relations into which we’re born or choose here in the land of bricks and weeds and trees and heat and dogs and pink blankets? 

You and I, we learned there are no missteps, no teetering blocks, no wrong and right ways. I am not overtaken by the wild mess of the big beautiful sprawling enclosure that is being alive. We did it. We really did.