messy, as in your mud-splashed pants, that day we should have stayed
inside during the rains. As in the folly of a mother’s insistence. The walk to
the shop we braved, for insistence’s sake. Messy, as in the ice cream I was
too distracted to catch before it avalanched over the edge of the cone I was
holding. Your triple chocolate treat puddling at our feet, while I stared at my
phone screen. How you rummaged through my coin purse, mouth
immaculate as a blade, its angles an accusation. How emptiness can stain a
moment, if not a memory. Messy, as in my smile, skidding unwittingly into a
serious childhood grievance. Your favorite toy, broken. An argument with a
friend. Sometimes, even if I don’t want to, it’s as though I graffiti no big deal
in sloppy letters across your sadness, then crash. Messy, as in a starling,
lying on its back in the street, stone-still. The broken-winged one you had
begged me to stop and save, but we were late to somewhere. Lateness, the
messiest apology for those difficult mornings, time teetering on the cliff
edge of its own crumbling seconds. The way I sometimes can’t stop my
rebukes from marching across the field of my voice, like a battalion. Messy
is as messy does, my loves. The more I fail to observe the world through the
eye of your storms, the messier I feel in the aftermath. As if I were buried
nose-deep in mud. As if I were the aftermath.
