To Coalesce

          In the angled shadows from the shed, we went rogue as we lay in the grass.  Chipped paint from the white wood panels surrounded us like the white bone pieces you find when you are broken from summer love affairs.  We took no notice of them though while we tangled ourselves up.

          Six months ago, if you would have asked me where I pictured myself in the future, I would have told you that “I won’t be in the future.”  I was going to be on the fringes and the outskirts of the future.  No directions were ever going to lead me there because I wouldn’t let them.  I folded and tucked my map into a pocket that I never reached for.

          Then, five months ago, I got lost.  Normally, I craved misplacement and reached for uncertainty, but this time was different.  I refused to pull out the map though, and then, four months ago, I found you. 

          Shuffling through sidewalks caked with rusting snow, you wore a look that screamed counterfeit.  Everything about you was phony, and I think that that’s what I liked.  If you weren’t reliable, then there was no possibility of a future and I’d still be on the border. 

          The thing about borders is that you’re half a step away from the other side of the line.  In a springtime haze, I tripped, and found myself inside of the future that I tried so hard to stay away from.  It was full of mist and littered with the remnants of broken dreams, but the other thing that it had was you. 

          “Allegra, is it worse to fail at something, or never try in the first place?” you challenged me.  With my arm looped under your back, and your leg crossed over mine, we were knotted together and shaded from the world in the quiet shell of your backyard.  

          I strategically fed my fingers in the spaces between yours. 

          “Trying is a part of practicing, and practicing is a part of learning.”  I stopped. 

          You continued.  “What are we if we don’t know anything?” 

          In the comfort of that moment, I was reassured that I knew one thing.  You breathed me in and it was there that I now existed. 

          I nodded my head against the curve of your shoulder so you felt the confirmation.  I felt a nod back on the top of my head, and together we nodded in unison. 

          Bent against your body, I listened to heartbeat rhythms and they reminded me that pounding sounds charming when it has a purpose. 

          The evening was ending and the sun that originally peered over us at noon was now leaving us behind after a day of seclusion.  It sunk in-between dusty summer colors like tangerine, rose, mango, and plumb.  The absence was comfortable though because it meant that in the morning, there was more to come, and in instances like this, I knew that I was inside of the future.

          For the rest of the night, we coalesced under an emerging galaxy and nothing else ever promised us more than those surreal moments leading us towards potential. 


Shannon Waite is a writer who has earned her bachelor’s degree from Oakland University in English and Teaching English as a Second Language.  She also earned her certification in secondary education.  She currently teaches high school reading in Detroit, Michigan.  Her writing has been published in various publications of Oakland University’s Swallow the Moon, as well as some anthology publications from Grey Wolf Publishing.