For Those Who Loved You into Being
I.
I was hesitant to walk the levee trail by myself. I’m not naive enough to think we live in a world where this is always a good idea. I walked the dusty pea gravel trail for maybe 40 minutes, along the Wakarusa River as I have many times before, though before I was accompanied by boyfriends or friends as we used the landscape to fritter away time like it was a renewable resource.
I remember once Jimmy finding a fossil of some sort from the river. Through all the river’s currents, over so many years, an old imprint of life was dislodged from the silty river muck to arrive encrusted in mineral and dust on the banks of our brown and wide river where a boy from Dodge City picked it up, dusted it off and gave it to an unappreciative girl he thought he loved. Like the fossil, I clung to some old mysteries of life - broken bits of evidence impressed into a stone heart over and over again by family, by loves and friends that didn’t work.
