Advance, Always

I dynamited us. I lied.

However, you never told me how you really felt.

You, the anglophile,

always cooking Italian,

always said

I was wasting my time teaching.

Over and over again.

You were right.

Blue Moon bar.

Blue Jetta.

Blue v-neck.

I think you wore blue lipstick.

You suffused the antithesis of the blues and I blew it.

For what?

Nothing

You gave me a thick book of short stories before I left to teach in Turkey.

You asked me not to go.

I only told you “I love you” in my journal.

I think I told you I wanted to become a writer.

I wrote a hundred letters to you from Turkey, but they were abstract.

The book is long gone. I ripped out the inscription decades ago.

It read: Thanks for a wonderful and terrible summer. 1992.

You reached out 31 years later,

called it a midlife crisis with your girls gone away to adult lives.

You gave me a glimmer, a sliver of an opening.

You reached out, then retreated.

US Grant always said, “advance, always.”

He won.