​NINETEEN

Mitch

The night ran long, and it's embedded in the skin under our eyes. We look like crack addicts or alcoholics, I guess. We look like alcoholics.

Sela had a sleepover, and the first thing I wanted to do was drink like a fish in that garage, even grab that bucket of bleach and start guzzling. She knew. She knows. Elena. Man, I'm so sorry.

She was holding me, bleach going to our brain cells, and I changed my thinking. A twist, a turn, click-click. Just like that. I told her I wanted to go to a meeting with her.

And we're here now, our bleached-up brain cells helping us shower, dress and coat my poor wife's hands in a nearly fatal dose of Aquaphor.

We ate Georgie's bad cookies, and now Peg and her tattooed eyebrows are standing at the microphone. She calls me up, and I'm tugged back for a moment and that's when I see Elena's hand is still attached to mine. She squeezes it. One time. Two times. And then I float away.

Standing at the podium, the microphone hotly buzzing, I want to say things to them like love is the reason the sun glints its edge into my eyes and why my hands feather out into wings against a slow stream of wind. That the earth is small from the top of a roof and how it's never looked more manageable.

But then I’d have to clean my own clock.

And honestly, it's not even love, not love at all. It's more like a base condition that has no cure, and when I reach for my heart, it's not there.

Instead, Sela's in its place. Elena, too.

I twist them deep into my thoughts until my thoughts take to unraveling and silently say the only thing that comes to me, thinking of two people who have given me a lifetime supply of hope.

Don’t run.