i thought of you

i thought of you this morning when i woke up on the floor of lily's room, wrapping in her great-grandmother's blanket. there was a moment when my eyes had just opened & i was staring into the hardwood floor of her closet where i was back in your childhood bedroom, waiting for you to roll over and tell me it was time to get breakfast. (your parents would always take us out to that nice little cafe, and we'd sit in the grey backseat of that little green ford focus with the oregon plates reading POIKA) and then, of course, i saw her thigh-highs draped over the laundry basket & the thong on the floor and i was yanked out of it. 

i thought of you as i lay on that creaky old futon in the brownstone in brooklyn, and how in another life, it would've been us sharing that bed. it reminded me, strangely, of the bed we slept in at your family's cabin that one year. staring up at the ceiling, listening to the cars drive by & the sirens, and feeling the springs poke into my back, it could almost have been the dusty old bunkhouse room where we lay that one summer, somewhere so far north in minnesota it could've been canada.

and it was strange, i realised, how many places on the east coast reminded me so fervently of you. we never went that way together. i think the furthest we got must have been that little town in indiana, or maybe that class trip we took down through georgia. but never new england, which strangely feels the most like our home.