Unspoken

There are no secrets between us. I tell you all the lame stories I can’t manage to heave into the waiting human ears around me. I complain about my cold extremities, my shivering toes and my fingers that need more cloth than these thin gloves give me. I make a joke out of the way I collide with desks and trip over electrical cords while teaching. I assume you know what I’m talking about when I say see how this piece of fruit feels (not how it tastes.) How it goes down kind of rough, with tattered saline edges, not like the bittersweet citrus tendrils of grapefruit or the gentle slump of a soft banana sliced into cubes. How it has a skin on it, one that smells like the kindness of fresh air after long confinement. How it lingers on my palate like the swell of field berries almost gone with summer. How it carries me back to the chipped porcelain saucer of that night in the borrowed cabin and to the story we told each other about moths and their secret language: not two stories, but one, a handshake and a private disaster owned and befriended, a nod to the impossibility of living in that place. A private vow, a set of initials inked into a margin, a claim and a release, a triptych of seeds to remind us where our mouths were and of what they held, as if there were any chance we might forget.

I wrote this for Donny in 2008.

©Laura Sorrells 2008 

all rights reserved