85.

No one can know what a life whittles down to in the end, but the long procession of days probably doesn’t boil down to a single moment. But what about as long as we can hold our breath? Or the ten minute walk from your street to mine? Or a stretch of hours lying in a field tasting the onion grass from each others’ skin? Or a single night beneath the junebugs swimming through the black summer sky and your apple breasts bobbing in the dark water? Or a perfect week or month or year? We cannot know what will hold the meaning in the end.

But my guess is that those handful of days with you are the pit inside of the fruit and flesh of my receding youth and all the years to come. And no matter who you become or where you go or what you do or who you are with, you are where I will make my home. I have a shovel and ax and I’ll build it with whatever I can find, be it ink or wood or air, and afterwards I’ll lie in our green yard and drink tall glasses of cold water and guess the season by the tastes on the wind. And in the end if your life boils down to those same moments—when we both felt stuffed with cotton picked from the same golden field  beneath a wide open sky—then you know where I will be

-JSM

Dear Christ I think I'm in love.