Don’t go where I can’t find you

We talk with hands dangling from the side of a boat, fingers grazing the surface and ambling gently down the Illinois river, RV camps lining the banks alive and discarded. I lose you in intermittent blinding sunlight shot through a dense cloud bank.

“Don’t go where I can’t find you.”

“I won’t.”

“I’m serious.”

It’s just me now. The early heat tricks trees into budding too soon, leading their light green shape directly into the jaws of the next frost, but it’s alright. I’m insisting in a bar in some city out East, it’s alright, I promise, I’m sorry. White knuckles gripping a phone 1:37 a.m. downtown somewhere, can I come home now? If I promise I’m better, I’m lost somewhere, I think, can you come find me. There is the perfect circumference of the street lamp’s glow I’m standing in, hoping, and nothing beyond it. Nothing out there.

Submerged beneath the surface for years, you find my wrist and guide me back just in time to see the sun sink, the sun and I are always switching places like this. I’m standing — where is this — a sand dune, a drug soaked art gallery, some parking lot outside Milwaukee, atop an ancient frozen ocean of Europa watching our distant sun come find me all the way out here.

On the beach you ask me to imagine an ice age. The crystalized, freezing hot particles of a comet’s tail provoking the end of something, shattering the sky to pieces with spider webbed lightning.

“This is perfect. What the moon does to the waves.”

“I know it.”

“How it sorts everything out, makes it easy and weightless.”

“I know it.”

As if we weren’t folded into one another, realizing all of this at the same time. As if I wasn’t two years old, laughing for no reason, safe in my grandmother’s lap on the shore, watching barges only ever leaving.