And I Can't

There should be a limit, a statute of limitations like they taught you in law school a hundred years ago when you still believed.

You would be the lawyer and I the doctor. Childhood games becoming reality. We would be the ones to come back. Who went off the land, broke our backs and our bankbooks to capture the skills and the licenses that proved it, to bring power to the people. Our people.

We had the world and it hadn't even begun. That week in the cabin, the one by the creek, the one we couldn't afford but said hell with it and did it anyway. We paid the money, handed over all the twenties the teller would give us, and there we were, three thousand feet above the bitter Phoenix concrete. Naked inside a three-dimensional postcard: perfect green of the trees, the massive red rocks, the take-your-breath-away-blue sky. I swear I've never been so happy.

Did we sleep? I know we didn't eat. I remember packing up the boxes of food, barely touched, when we finally had to go home. Just the bed and your glorious body.

I sit on my hard chair in this poor substitute for a home. The summer rain kisses the window. I am a continent and a lifetime away, and I taste you. Can it be twenty years?

We didn't take pictures. I don't think either of us had a camera. None from that week in Sedona, not even any from our two years in the Indian School Road apartment. Classic address, we joked. I close my eyes but I cannot see your face. I know you were beautiful. You must have been. I can see the cabin and the creek and the trees. I can taste you. I can't see you.

And I can't tell if it is the rain or my tears.

M C R