flog - freewritelog

As always, she was there at the start of it

A few weeks ago, her youngest son
ran in the Boston Marathon.
She was not there to see it,
but she was there the day
that he qualified to run it.
She was there at the start of it.

Was there the night before the race,
when she and both her sons
drove by the first house that
her sons ever knew. Neither son
much remembered it, as the decades
have built different memories for them,
but they know the house and they knew
what it meant for her to see it
that night, before her son raced.

The older one did not dream of races.
He dreamed of experiences.
Of doing things.
Of being places.
And she was there to see him off
the morning he left home.
He’s been doing and being ever since
and she was there at the start of it.

And when they left for
Boston without her,
she did not say a word from hurt.
She knew that her sons were happy,
the oldest one being there and
the youngest one running;
doing both together and
she was there at the start of that, too.

The daydreams are never what you expect them to be

Watching her walk away
across the parking lot,
away from the bed, bath and beyond,
away from the old navy,
away from me,
I knew she’d be in my head
far longer than she should be.

I knew I’d be replaying that afternoon
as the on-demand movie in my head.
I had that fucker queued and ready to help
make my drive to Pittsburgh easier.

Should’ve known better than to trust
my technology; to trust a playback ritual
that I’ve not yet perfected.

Watching her walk away,
across the parking lot,
I would have bet pints of blood
that I would be daydreaming about
that ass or about those
fantastically exposed collarbones.

Not that inexplicable flash of cardinal
running through her eyes
when the cloud cover interrupted
the mid-day sunlight while we sat there;
laughing nervously face to face,
instead of confidently hitting “Send” and
ripping through the ether with false bravado.