Long legs amble in your very unique stride across the parking lot through the entrance to Whole Foods. You get your cart, you get your provisions, you get pomegranate seeds and your pears. “Pomegranate seeds… I want that. And, I got my pears”. And the tone of your voice and your definitive decision on fruit, a tender implosion in my heart.
You grab a couple of bottles of kombucha. One for you, and one for me to have when I am at your house. You contemplate cashews and salted edamame snacks (perhaps they were soy) and the worth of a vegan blueberry muffin. You laugh and groan in obliging disgust as I tell you an anecdotal story about the time I bit into a crisp baby carrot with a mushy middle. And how the incongruence of the two textures has left me fearful of ever bitting into a baby carrot again. I told that story to you and you listened with ease.
Such a regular thing to do with you. Such a daily thing. Like eating candy from a box that rests on our chest, or the languid page turning of a travel book or an atlas. Or drinking tea. Languid daily things that hem in the eternal. And I felt it eternity there with you in the store. An a priori gliding across shiny linoleum and grocery store ephemera.
You neared the check out line and became serious, now faced with work of the conveyor belt and cashier. “I love you”, you say.
“I love you too”, I say back, hoping so deeply that those five words in that little moment are to you the obvious, discernible and undeniable manifestation of every love strand I have for you.
And now, small little pauses and tender vocalizations as we say goodbye and in tandem, hang up the phone.
(After I wrote this I realized that it was four years to the day when I stood in the frozen predawn hours before work in front of a cavernous mailbox and dropped that letter to you).
Sonic Drops 