Familiar passion

I remember sitting on the floor of your bedroom, rummaging through that rusted filing cabinet. “Who’s this?” I ask, holding up sepia. You, before me. A whole life I had caught glimpses of in old photographs, love letters, and lines on your cheek, but knew nothing of. Inspecting old baseball cards from under your bed,…

taxidermy: the art of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of animals. There’s a city a few hours from here stuffed with people who love the old me. There’s a boy sitting in a stained green booth waiting to buy me another round. There’s a girl in a farmhouse basement waiting for me to return…

On the flight back from Venice, somewhere above the Atlantic, she put her head in my lap and whispered, “Are we almost home?” “I think so,” I yawned, running my fingers through her hair. We decided to split a cab home from the airport, but she instructed the driver to keep going as we rolled…