April 5th, 2014 

soon! Sweet girl, I'll arrange to conveniently be wherever you last saw your 

innocence. Maybe it was the final time you held a porcelain doll and felt the lovely 

cool skin as if it were life. Or maybe it was when you kissed him for the first time 

and felt the rug burns on your knees as you moved over him erupt into blossom and 

it felt like new life but it was only that the burn left scabs that looked like wildflowers 

so you had to wear bandaids under your jeans as you walked around the campus of your 

high school under the trees that knew and bent low to touch your cheek and say now 

you have become a woman. Now you are ancient and lovely like us. Or maybe it was the 

23rd summer which you spent hiding from the lightening under friends’ windowsills or 

maybe it’s still under that very first windowsill which was also a boat and also a whale 

and also a carriage and also a white horse.  I will wait there and whisper to you in that 

secret language you perceive only as movement through water that the weight of this 

moment will melt like soap against skin. When you feel a warmth on your cheek, smile 

at me, who you will become, and heed what I say.