Reconnecting

I remember that year as a darkness–
a living room with the shades drawn
and the arch of your hunched shoulders,
and the matching arch of your headphones.
I came to his room at the end of each day
broken down into my elements:
just an eye, staring into the color-changing lamp.
Just a curled frame, no lightning.
It took months of trying, a floor covered
with the shatter of his failed attempts at comfort,
like the rug in a kindergarten classroom 
confetti-filled with scraps of construction paper.
We don't get safety scissors anymore,
so there might have been a little blood.
There were certainly a lot of tears.
But little by little, like the bloom of the sun
unfolding every day after winter solstice,
he helped me towards my light.
And you shuffled back from your depths,
mud-covered, all on your own. We met
each other after the storm, bumping elbows
during the cleanup, swapping stories
of the devastation as comrades do.
Everyone's survival takes a lonely path.
The gaps between experience and expression 
yawn wide, even when we tread the darkness
side by side. The essential thing is to meet
when the dust settles. To tell our tales until
they are woven into one story that is
half yours, and half mine.

Carole Anzovin (she/her) is a poet in Western Massachusetts, who relishes building local queer community and strives to live life with joy, attention, and presence. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Stone Circle Review, FERAL, Impossible Archetype, Corvid Queen, and other journals.