beneath a moonless sky

I’m sorry that I took so long to tell you that I loved you when I knew that I did.

Somewhere at the core of my father’s obsession was a set of values that still feel true to me: that wine is just a beverage that goes with food, neither demon nor fetish; that local stores should not determine the limits of your culinary pleasure; that there is a warm joy in giving people food you made yourself, even if it is simple. Especially if it is simple. That gardening and cooking and fermenting and decanting can give you, if not a home, then at least a feeling that you belong to yourself even if you’re not sure who exactly you are anymore.

A sky so big it pushes down on my ribcage. a love so big, maybe. Do we play the fools now? halfway into October and afraid of our own skeletons. There’s champagne dripping through the attic floorboards of my heart. the vinyls left spinning again, all the faucets running, for you, for you—

In my head there’s another universe where we are together and you didn’t go left and I didn’t go right—and we walked side by side, hand in hand, straight towards the light.