A Territory Without Maps

We fed a candy cane to a Newport gull a few weeks before Christmas.

She introduced me to Love Actually and I cried at the corn pone.

On Christmas Eve we hit a dump strip club in Portland

before witnessing a family’s worst children’s Christmas show

in American holiday history.

A few weeks later,

we sat across a table from one another in an Astoria cafe

famed for pepper jellies and voodoo décor.

She said crying.

“I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

I asked why.

It was the first I’d heard of her being drugged and raped in San Francisco.

Something had surfaced.

Everything was now unraveling for her.

She couldn’t be with me anymore.

She couldn’t explain.

On the long drive home,

we barely talked. No music.

We made one stop,

a beach walk for my invalid husky.

She stayed in the car.

She never asked for my help.

I never offered any.

When I clenched her hips,

felt the furnace of her torso,

I was exploring a

territory without maps.

I have never been there again.

We didn’t try.

Almost two decades later,

I still don’t know why.