When they operated on the wrong hip in Anchorage, I visited you in the Seattle Children’s Hospital, which I had to get my father and his student lover to agree to, which meant I rode in the back of a farm-used white Mazda pickup with a bouquets of flowers and my irritated sister, and I didn’t mind that you were so drugged up you didn’t even remember I was there. After I moved two thousand miles, I would be willing to call you, and after you moved one thousand miles in the middle of our freshman years of college, I would be willing to call you. To ask your mother, to ask the phone machine, to ask your Bernese Mountain Dog with her calico answers, and your sister who hated mathematics and dirty dishes more anything else in the world, and wasn’t she an example of how sexuality is no result of gender characteristics? Even if it took you a year to tell me, the blood you dreamt dripping off your bed, your roommate Yolanta’s bed and the blood that explored the channeled corners of your body, and the ghosts that reappeared. I’d send you pine cones on April Fools and because of your fear of pine cones, and sending you something like a pine cone on your birthday is better than admitting I am a lesbian, and I miss you so badly I pound cockroaches into my carpet and find cul-de-sacs with my 1970’s Oldsmobile and think of the shrimp gathered within bridge nets, cast like water rainbows out upon the oil-glistened waters.

I spend the year away from you gathering recycled materials and returning them in exchange for donuts; I spent the year exploring the state-of-the-art landfill they had upon the border of Alabama and Florida, where I remember a white lily growing in the ditch they called reclamation and all the garbage floating along a conveyor belt they said was ninety-five percent efficient in excavating the donuts I bought along the toll bridges to the white sands that were ninety-five percent warmer than Alaska and the only place I could find where I didn’t feel like a vacuum for the refuge gathered and recycled along ditches made of gravel and lonely flowers; I spend the year being a child.

I held your child. He was so beautiful, and I always felt I did the best I could to hear. Then I tried to get your lover like me, and when you stopped responding to my letters and phone calls, I tried to blame it on myself but then social networking and your acknowledged friendship with the girl who plagiarized a poem in seventh grade, which you were the one to tell me about, which had once made me feel okay again—because she was the one who told the boys at the party turn away from me and say ewwww, and I was just again the outsider, never not in love enough, never normal, even though I knew you too were something different, someone I always thought adult, and maybe I thought adulthood could wipe it all away and turn her plagiarism and also my strangeness silent like the way adult words even out, sound just real enough, and maybe everybody would be worth reaching back for—turned out to be overly educational, like your mother, like your reading list, like the brewers yeast you sprinkled over popcorn, even when we were in sixth grade and trying to flirt at the movie theater. I remember how you played the violin, the resin you rubbed and rubbed against the strings, and the way you pulled and rotated your knuckles for mobility. And how you never once let me hear you play.