SAGA

We were all played out, sleepless in the faux village, and everyone was happy.

The day the bar closed for good they hosted a party that lasted nearly a week. With the light from the sky blushing over the Spree we were peering at the ridge as dreamers awake. That last Sunday at dawn we drank Sekt. Around us, wayfaring adults on the playground danced, and yearned, and celebrated. Swings were scattered in the garden along discarded bumper cars, disco balls dangling from the trees. Inside the shed was a fireplace. The city seemed far behind us, behind the wooden fence. I saw the pull of youth, the need to want to understand, or not, calm as clemency resting on the surface of the river. My eyes shut for a moment and I felt what I thought was your embrace. We were all played out, sleepless in the faux village, and everyone was happy. We were shielded in a daze and agreed that ignorance and inexperience in either case are not harmless. For years I’d wake up then, your eyes milky and my liver sick, until I remembered we’d already broken up and that in real life we ended things much less gracefully, and as I convinced myself that it was not my fault , that it was no one’s fault, in the strangest kind of way I do persist, now I wonder if you might have liked how irreversible, how dramatic the whole thing was.