never breaking up

Sitting in a restaurant, sipping water and listening to live music; wearing a skirt, feeling grown up but not knowing where my statements are, unable to pay bills because I've lost my checkbook.

Dimly lit restaurant, thinking about pressures and my major and how I'd really rather not worry about things. I needed the strength of the temple today, but it was closed. Why! Claire and I laid on the grass instead, in the dribbling rain drops, giggled and giggled and thought about how tied our hearts are--how we're never breaking up. We looked up and could see nothing, nothing but sponge-painted gray clouds, and the top pricks of evergreen trees.

"I wonder why God made us so small," I muse, enveloped by sheets and sheets of mosaic gray.

They are curved in a way that makes me think I have been swallowed by the whole world, digested and plopped at the core. Turns out it's not hot; turns out it's raining there, in actuality.

"Yeah," she agrees. " I feel big and small, at different times. But I feel big right now."

We know Washington, us two; we know gray skies and clouds and rain; and somehow had neither one laid in the drops ever before.

Drip, drop

Claire's green shirt dampens

my freshly shaven legs feel prickly

I looked into her wide brown eyes and found things there I've somehow never looked at, like I was seeing her for the first time, enjoying her easy laugh and expressive hands. If I could describe our relationship in that silence, in that effortlessly falling rain, I would maybe cite giggles and holdings and how we just appreciate and understand each other; maybe I'd talk of how we love the same things and how she excites and inspires me; how we're soul mates of sorts, perhaps I'd say. But I didn't want to crackle the silence that was so full.

Maybe I'll mention, then, how we're both sitting close, in the same silence--writing in our journals. This silence is now filled to tipping point with really beautiful music.

I can't break away to study theory when there's all of what I actually want out of music sitting here, in a dimly lit restaurant, without pretense of a skirt

or shoes that make sound

or flat hair matted by the greatest rainfall I can think of.

so young.