I've never let go

I’ve never let go

of that house I looked at

with my mother

when she and my father

were getting divorced.

I was fifteen and carrying a torch

for my best friend kate,

a kind of crossed-fingers

I held behind my back

while my romances

with other girls

waxed and waned.

she dated the same guy, adam,

throughout all of high school,

but still she’d joke

that we’d live next door

to each other, she and I,

when we were old,

in some place mundane

like oklahoma,

where we’d sit side by side

in rocking chairs on one of our

wide porches,

reminiscing about all of the

adventures we’d had

alone or with others,

but, implicit in this vision,

mostly together.

part of the joke here

was the hazy role

our respective future spouses

played in all this.

I hated the house

my mother had to settle for,

at first, for it was near nothing

I cared about, in a part of town

that felt soulless and borderline

dangerous, plus its architecture

and yard were bland.

but what do I remember

about this other house,

except that its narrow kitchen

had blue tiles above its counter

and the window above them

and above the sink there

looked out on a cozy backyard

darkened by a steep hill

lush with cascading ivy

and it was five or six doors

down the affluent, curving,

dead-end street

from kate’s father’s house?

yet those details suffice

to keep our long-dead friendship alive.

I’ll go back there one day, won’t I; that’s how I am.

I’m there now, but I won’t let myself out

and I can’t get in.