two tulips
Photo: Bella Johansson, Stockholm 2025.
I had forgotten the taste of my own mouth. Tasteless caven. The cell of an unkissed prisoner. The jury had weighed in and I had no appeal.
I touched your mouth for the first time since the breakup. Foreign feeling, your lips felt bigger and fluffier. The circumference of your lips grew as the invasion of the breakup troops stormed us. My lips sat on the loveseat of your mouth. The couch had new springs, as if I’d never sat there before. What restored you?
We were following an old road to our hometown. We navigated our way through the tree-lined streets to the destination. We followed our intuition of left and right, over the hill, past the big peppercorn tree on the final gravel road to the weatherboard house of love. The rolling tongues of people who knew every part of one another. The road was fresh under my feet, although I’d walked it so many times before. The air felt different, there was a frigid breeze.
You lived in the present and I the past and the future. I sat on either side of time with you. You so magnificently in the now. I had much to learn about life.
Two red tulips in a bed of black soil, planted readying for the spring, far from each other, but within a border of aged knowing wood. Being perennial plants, I hoped we too would persist as underground bulbs after we died during our first flowering. We would have a second Spring.
