Buoy
Why did you leave? he asked. We were drunk. Bottles of beer, wine, whisky
teetered on the card table at the make-shift family event. Just enough
swimming in our brains. The question had floated around us for months.
I did leave for almost a decade. My brother grew up with only stories
about me. How did I explain my passage across the Great Lakes, Appalachian
Mountains, Atlantic Ocean? My urgency to be anywhere else? Be anyone else?
How suffocated I’d felt by expectation, error, the perfidy of friends and lovers?
How did I answer the dinghies in his eyes, the blue blue hope? So easily
capsizeable despite the grizzle of his beard? The squareness of his jaw?
I left a boy that liked to snuggle. My body remembered the squiggle of him.
I taught him to swim. He tried to teach me how to play Dungeons
and Dragons. How did I justify the relief I’d felt? When far from home
and a stranger? I was on a quest, I guess. I finally said, following a buoy
of memory. He clinked my glass with telltale enthusiasm, To leveling up.
TORI GRANT WELHOUSE is a poet and novelist from Wisconsin with an award-winning poetry chapbook Vaginas Need Air (Etchings Press) and a prize-winning YA fantasy novel The Fergus (Skyrocket Press). She was nominated for Best of the Net and is an active volunteer for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and co-creator of the literary magazine Bramble. Learn more www.torigrantwelhouse.com.
