For Dylan and Emma, for being my friends
“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
— Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
My friend Dylan was talking. Or maybe it was just
the night, the din of bay by our boots. The three of us
were lying on this dock, the middle of January, and there
was a salt to the air like there has been all of the other times
that I have come here. Salty nights spent with fistfuls
of my shoulders, the quiet gathering of hips. The power-chord
of togetherness. Just bodies and selfishness. Emma said,
I can’t tell if I’m awake or asleep. Dylan said, you’re just drunk.
Once, Emma loved a boy who only loved her back when
she was crying. He would say, you’re much prettier this way
and she would say, I love you too. And it went like this.
I watched a heron wane through the marsh, watched
as he flew father in, startled by our beings, our human
noise. I don’t know why, but I said a prayer then. I prayed
he would make it to wherever he was going. Prayed for
the winter to end, for the brandy in my body to last all night.
I let my knee fall into Dylan’s and I thought about all the
men that I have shared this with: the boys he has invited up,
the boys whose names he already has forgotten. I said,
we’re lucky, and Emma skipped a rock five times. Dylan
moved his knee away and said, I could head right on out
into the moonrise. And I didn’t say anything, but I knew
that this was the kind of lunch-box-note, letterman-jacket,
Lady-and-the-Tramp love I have only been able to find
in books and commercials for coastal resorts. I could
hear my heart beating. I heard everyone’s heart.