Every time we’d walk beside the ocean, she’d find a rock shaped like love. I was beginning to think they waited for her, coughing their way out from the coiled salt water.
Last night, over an Autumn spiced cupcake, the three of us spoke about love. He told me about the last time and the way clocks lost their meaning when he was with her. Sometimes you meet someone and they grab your hand and the sensation of the shape of their skin pleasantly bruising yours feels like it should be hung in a museum. Feels like some scholar should be studying it because so often we hold onto things that we forget the names of and when you touch something that audibly calculates every cell and freckle on your body, something is happening.
I think I am in love with my memories.
What happened is this. I got dressed. I walked outside. The rain was hunting the ground with bullets of ice. I have been trying to turn left more recently. A lover once told me to keep my mind fresh, change your patterns. Walk away from routine. Find a new way to get to where you always need to be.
After my left, I make a right and keep walking. This route is much quieter. I hold the hand of the ghost who climbs beside me. They smell like old books and thyme. We slide over patches of winter. I try not to think about the time we picnic’d on a railroad. When the rocks climbed beside my bones. You wouldn’t stop speaking about geometry and hot rolled steel. Do you remember? We ate with dirty fingers and it was either summertime or winter, but what mattered is how each bite felt like a photograph.
What if love is really just a sound and we’ve all been mispronouncing it and no one is left to tell us the proper form.
He asks me if I am capable of love and I hesitate telling him that my previous lovers would probably answer that as a no. But I say yes.
What is left but to turn around and rewrite a poem interrupted by music. I repeat the same three chords on my ukelele and belt out a Prince refrain, later covered by O’Conner. Sometimes love is taken away and other times, when you thought it was there, it really never existed. So maybe there is no answer to what it even is. It can be difficult to call or classify. Kind of like eggplant.
Aimee Herman 