At lunch, after a weekend of skies cast like grumpy parents, aged, I drift away. My thoughts curl to the spring of commencement. Your belly struck out in front of you like force-fed evidence of your love and sex and rebellion. This is my corner of the world, you once told me, placing my fingers over the then non-violent curve of growth inside you. I joked about melons, and basketballs, and the size you'd be just before you'd deliver. You'd be full with your potential. Then, you told me you weren't afraid of staying here your whole life-- two point eight miles north of our middle school, where you ran track, where you ran to escape home and barely brought back Cs.
Eleven years later, I've earned space in another city, seven-hundred-and-fifty-three miles from our middle school. Now, between aperitif and entree, I wonder if I'm far enough away, after all, from our book-end dead-end streets, because you've sent to me pictures of a tow-haired boy I held, as a baby. Do you remember? If this is you, please write back. Studying the picture, I am amazed by your son; that he is the sum of years between then and now; that there is nothing violent about how he fits you there.