Postcard from the Party
You have to be invited, and there’s nothing
you can do to be asked. Headlines and bloodlines
don’t help. It’s a long way from home but I’m
here, the view much better than I’m used to.
How did this happen? Dumb but good luck,
right place and time, the planets aligned.
No contract, no deadline, no risk. And what
did I do to deserve this? Slept with all
the wrong people, gambled too much on friends
of friends with light bulbs over their heads.
Wrote every day no matter what.
by Wyn Cooper
from Postcards from the Interior
We mostly do not exist except in small windows. Welcome to my apt-for-any-century, turn-based text-based slow-budding relationship. It isn’t enough. It is just right. It’s perfect. It’s frustrating. I worry. I care too much. I don’t care enough. I am honored. I am afraid. Sometimes I fade into sleep with my phone on my pillow and wake with it sweetly cradled to my chest, a voice on the wire device warmed by my skin.
Approximately fourty-eight hours from now, give or take a handful, a radiant man (not a boy, though I often call him a boy with the same precision used when I often call myself a girl) will begin to travel North. He will drive a large metal beast across his country’s border to find me, following a road that I have traveled a thousand times, and he will succeed.