SOLARICARUS

is buried under wildflowers and fir trees. Her

graveyard hums in a quiet neighborhood, slumped in the shadow of the nearby

college campus that gave me my degree last Spring. One 

year ago. She settled there four years ago. I go there when

I am feeling sorry for myself. 

I went there today. I walked up the hill with a stolen dandelion in my 

hand, cupping my other around it against the wind like I would for

a candle. I intend to blow it out like one too. Four birthdays of unspent

wishes. There were people by her grave already, so I wandered down

the path to a place in the sunlight, where the

Headstones of strangers are a soft, aching comfort. 

I am feeling sorry for myself because 

there is an absence, a widening distance, between

myself and the life I have been given to live. There are 

two names in the weathered stone before me, and 

They tell me to sit and listen to the poetry of today. 

Warmth soaks into my skin as I translate the

words being told to me by wind and crows calling

their dark refrains into the evening. A train 

cries in the distance, lonely, gravely stating that 

Moving forward is a labor of asking unanswered questions. 

Where does this disquiet beneath my ribs go? What do I

do with it, now that I have it? I did not invite it. I barely

want it, growing where it is, sharper and wilder by each passing

hour. I cannot contend with it, with the faded colors of my 

recent memories, with the dulled sensations telling me 

Each day is faster and shorter than the last. 

Two squirrels interrupt my feeling sorry for myself, falling

over themselves on their way down my little stolen 

avenue. We make eye contact. Both of them freeze

their tiny bodies and stare, unmoving, removed

like I am from their unthinking momentum, as 

The sun falls in earnest, unasked for, never slowing. 

A slow purgatory descends between us, my 

strange companions and I, because I do not want the

guilt of startling them, because I am afraid I will be too

loud. We watch each other, and I think to myself that I will

wait until they go, and so the minutes stretch on, and

Nothing changes for minutes, maybe hours, maybe years.

I realize, breathing in, watched by graveyard squirrels, 

if I want to see my friend, my life, my self, if

there is a peace to be made with the slow changes 

creating unknown space around my heart, I have to

Risk, every day, moving first.  

As I stand and dust the sap from my hands, the squirrels

scatter away from me into the bright, flooded horizon where

trees make a frame of lead bars around a stained glass

window I had forgotten to look through. I take my dandelion

worth decades up into the shade, away from the headstones of

strangers. I stop by the flower and stone-laden grave of my friend,

the poet, and I 

Promise to never waste a wish.

--

I am feeling sorry for myself. 

Headstones of strangers are a soft, aching comfort. 

They tell me to sit and listen to the poetry of today. 

Moving forward is a labor of asking unanswered questions. 

Each day is faster and shorter than the last. 

The sun falls in earnest, unasked for, never slowing. 

Nothing changes for minutes, maybe hours, maybe years.

Risk, every day, moving first.

You and I were trying not to melt popsicles into our hair as we laid on scorching asphalt pretending to have something to do. Your mom called you to tell you the news. My mom was at work. I rolled over onto my stomach like that’d trick you into thinking I wasn’t going to listen; I had to scooch a few inches closer after to hear her little voice in your ear. She was yelling, and talking so fast you had to ask her to calm down, but she wouldn’t. She was crying. She wouldn’t stop saying it.

            “They’re real, they’re real, they’re real,” she repeated. By that point I had gotten out Google to see what the fuss was about, and sure enough, it was all over everywhere. Instagram, Twitter, the New York Times. Across the street, a quiet kind of hum had started to build as doors swung open and people’s voices raised. You and I? We stayed laying on my driveway. Your popsicle was starting to drip onto your shirt.

            “Should we go inside?” I asked you. You just shook your head and put your arms back beneath your neck. You were looking up, so I looked up too, at blueness so thin and wide it stretched across my whole face. Like breathing through a bandana, all sweat and heat and sticky, depthless pressure. It’s important to me to say that we were shoulder to shoulder.

            No one ever thought we’d actually find life on Mars. We aren’t supposed to. We won’t ever find the cure for cancer; the ocean will remain 5% explored until the sun explodes. There are certain immutable facts about life as we know it: the sky is blue, and my shoulders are too skinny and always cold, and we will never find life on Mars.

            But yesterday they did it. They found them. Martian aliens, description pending; Martian aliens with big eyes and green hands and unscrupulous machines. Martian aliens buried in ice and finally unthawed. Martian aliens of all sizes, shapes, and colors, a whole Pandora’s Box of them unleashed. We will never return to a world without Martian aliens.

I made my own important discovery yesterday: my left shoulder will never be cold again.

            Somewhere down the street, glass shattered. We laid on my driveway, sweating in our jeans and t-shirts, and I bit into my popsicle hard enough to crack the wood.

            “What if we just ignore them?” I asked you, suddenly. Turned to face you, to watch where your eyes had gone. To take in your tan, your sunglasses, your solidness. The gravity of you, taking up half of my space. Your steady weight.

            You shrugged again and you asked, “Do you want to?” and I chewed at my popsicle stick until it bruised. I had to be quiet for a little while.

            Yes, I want to. Yes. Let me stop time; let me reduce all creation to this driveway and its asphalt and our sticky fingers. Let me give us a window up into blue space. Let’s wave at them, the Martians, from our square of asphalt, and wish everyone else good luck. Let our shoulders fuse into some heavier element, something noble and permanent and impossible to fracture, and let us never die.

            “Nah,” I said to you, yesterday, closing my aching eyes. “Might as well see what happens.”

            The aliens will change everything forever. That’s what the news says. Welcome the aliens when they arrive! We were so devastatingly wrong about them. We will not need things to be like the way they’ve been any longer. We can finally advance.