Alyson

“All because of a damn horse,” Cormac McCarthy writes in All the Pretty Horses.

I think about what I would say to you about the paint beneath my fingernails—that is, if you asked—and how I would explain my night painting with the sticks you sent me, peeling back the layers and catching some on my hands. Painting a picture of myself as you see me. A puzzle we have taken these months to build, in which you made me persevere. I said I didn’t like puzzles, but I just hadn’t known your puzzles. Those took everything in me but left an incubated serenity where the hungry ache used to nook. And where you were once.

I try to retain the geometry of you. ♦