May 3rd, 2014

We drove down empty streets on a gray February day somewhere in Rhode Island seven years ago. I had my lap top and we kept it open as the car moved slowly by houses until we found unsecured internet. Then we stopped and idled and looked up real estate. Your dreams then were not my own, but I tried very hard to be with you there, although, the closest I believe I ever got was to wait just outside the austere gates of your designs for you to notice the garden I was planting around the periphery. You were always a cross stitch in black thread of some puritanical axiom, and I was the flowers embroidered around the solid lettering to bring in what beauty was allowed. Not very much was, and since you it has taken me three years and many many mistakes to remember what beauty I was born with. Now I understand the looks of other men when I expressed my unending devotion, my hands dripping with dirt from the garden I planted for us, my hair tangled with flowers I so wished you would notice. Later that day it snowed and the car was stuck on a hill. The slicked road would not give us traction and finally I steered and you got out and pushed and, then, then, we were together. If only you would have joined me outside of that city of your dreams and come, even just for an afternoon, to the garden. We would have together known the wet warm of dirt and all the possibility in its depths.