Unbecoming

The streets have teeth and we hold our fingers with enough space for the others and drink cider on a corner where the ceiling above us blinks blue-blue-blue onto her tonsil-pink dress and someday I hope I never have to see it in a suitcase, all the lace piled on itself like a bowl of noodles; I have been waiting for her to find that tab in her memory— sitting knee to knee at a tight table, the broth steaming our faces dewy and familiar. She never carries a bag and it makes me wonder who locks the doors at night, whether she’ll wait at the window to catch piano babble in the courtyard, if she’s seen pigeons scatter (linseeds on linoleum), ever noticed how we lay with our eyes turned up at night but not to the sky. On Tuesday she crouches in the dust by the curb, traces her toe through it, looks up glistening in the swollen light, shoulders rounded with sleep and waiting under both of us is the hour she leaves— a final morning when he wears his hair above his ears and holds his fear behind him and she cries in the bathroom before reapplying mascara. She’s never walked barefoot in this city but today she has the desire to untie her sneakers so they don’t echo down the stairs on the way out. So this is not the last sound he hears of her. Somewhere along the way, they have both become birds in nets and today it’s all wings in wire, feathers and string, the unopened sound of a jar on the counter with nothing to fill. She sips but can’t swallow, he watches for the cab from the stoop, the sap of morning yellowing behind the stoic facades up the street. She wonders how to break cleanly, how this will seem when it’s over. There’s movement under the signal light, an engine accelerating, and he looks the other way as she goes— suddenly has the desire to wedge his nails on that sunrise and pull, to watch what arises in the final seconds of proximity, when they’re both undone in the same city. 

(inspired by a photograph by Trinity Vu)

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