to be near

To be near she who was for so long an idol, and I was for a shining time her adored pet.

We had such aspirational affection, and of course, immature to us both in hindsight, but no less lovely. We use words like "quite" and "lovely." She has taken to enunciating in tiny stacatto any two ts together in words, hard edged unlike our native lazy approach to consonants - we tend to bevel the edges at least.

After a protracted separation, her brief return is from a place that is a shining castle and museum of humanity and civilization. Her brief return is to a place that has county roads, no real center of population and a large number of heavy pickup trucks driven as a matter of course, down those county roads who are all shrugging their shoulders into ditches, from a place where three lanes become six, but there is not much horn honking.

Plus, as she says, "The noise just goes down into the water."

Everyone wants a piece of she and her daughter. Silent fights simmer, never quite breaking boiling, and legitimately inflated lower lips lumber along as giant balloons over upturned faces. All are quite miserable in their love and impatience. We starve for her and we are glad that she can do quite well without us, but what we don't understand is that she doesn't see that we like it when she is near. We do not understand how she could not understand what we understand and alternate between long stretched sinewy tension transmitted digitally, slowly, like getting messages back from distant planets, and loathing for our own expectations and needs.

Also, we are here, in rustic crude metal huts, among crumbling parking lots and empty storefronts, however tastefully the insides of our own homes are decorated. There is no charm here, this crude establishment which is slowly being painted over with more storefronts that will before too long also crumble to shit. Given the setting, is there any wonder there is something ambivalent in the feelings?