My next-door neighbour is practicing piano. Green plastic lawn chairs have been perfectly placed, tilted, in to sit against the picnic table.

This is how we keep the rain out.

In this warm, dry loft, tucked away, we climb under covers with flashlights and secrets. The rain on our roof is like keys locking, like curtains sealing this moment off from others. You whisper—all it takes for me to hold on, to wait with you, tell you everything, shout in bed, naked.

The moment comes and passes like wind’s pause on the backs of some wild orange flower. Some sunny summer afternoon, you were lying on your backs in a forest of grass. You thought the rest of the world was still with you.

You felt the change that came when the news did.

The moment a person dies, movement does stop.

Moments like slides split down the middle.

Winter laundry hangs, stiff; I lie in bed at midnight and watch icicles form. My covers slip around ankles, warm against my bare legs. I know that everyone’s asleep. This house moves like creaking floors with our breath, breathes out into the cool night air as we do. The silence is so still it’s almost unbearable.

The hotel room held our sweat. Two sisters tried to share covers that lay between us, twisting around our six-year-old bodies like tangled melting wax. With each dream, we sweat more, felt more the realness of this sheet being pulled from both ends, felt more its corners as they touched our legs, slipping.

Trees’ leaves stop to move for moments as wind pauses through our school playground. It’s recess, and about to rain: we hide behind portables, bypass getting picked for the safety of unspeaking and accepting dirt. Pine cones speak silently as they fall gently beside us, create new wind from flight.

Years later, we’ll go camping. We’ll say it’s the nature that brings us back each year.

The rain smells like June. Recess doors prop open to let in air filled with dodge balls that suspend in flight, kids who yell as they run, orange peels and candy wrappers that fall at their feet. The smells densify and suspend, waiting. Each one is heavy with its own weight of time, each one disperses and condenses as it moves, permanent.  

I am still splayed out on our kitchen counter like fruit. Each time I pass, I pick through parts for those I want, rummage through fruit flesh like garage sale boxes for what to keep.

Later, I pretend that it’s whole. Pretend it always has been.

Inside of you, all of this stops. Those places that you go curtain voices laughing, faces that come close, moments you miss. The moments pass by you like moths, slip out from between panes of glass as you try press them  together.

You go home and wait to readjust. Turn on lamps and music in different rooms, give yourself the feeling that others are here, have always been here. You even change clothes around to fit the you that lives here: pajamas with soft striped pink socks. The socks feel warm against you and this warmth feels like someone else’s lifeblood rubbing up against yours.

Here, you sit alone in a memory. The loneliness fills your kitchen like candlelight.

What I remember most about baths was afterwards.

Your ritual was to soften my curls with your fingers and towel as they dried in the dim light up our upstairs hallway. You sang me rhymes about mice and pigs running home, tickled my feet and scratched my back.

I knew that no one would ever leave me. I knew that I had this soft blanket placed and lifted, readjusted, over me again and again.

This is where you leave me: tinted sunlight that comes filtered through window bars, dust on floors, overripe fruit, other languages yelled across aisles. I am three feet tall and alone.

I look down diagonally at the sun that comes down diagonally at floor parts, foot parts, me parts. The smell of brown bananas lines the memory.

Your toes curl inward when you sit here beside me, like some thoughts curling up inside you. I picture those white wool socks like pillows covering you, ears that muffle thoughts.

Your book on the couch captures you. Neither of us know the shape our  bodies make. Between us though, we curl in. between us, your toes move     just enough for me to believe it.

Snow bleeds white light onto our street as it falls. I leave the kitchen now for new air and white sky.

This first snow is a delicate reign: its softness like a fire it breathes into us.