I remember you wild hair and ready grin breezing through Taylor at 2am in a red track suit a literal dollar to your name taking me wide eyed and willing down back country Carolina roads you wore confidence like a crown when you were 19 I remember you running steady though the Short North at night singing as you meandered home from Brothers in your new suit, exuberant trying the good life on for size opening bottles and turning off the heat we huddled in every layer we owned on the couch to keep warm pilfering cable off of rabbit ears a little to the left while we casually contemplated buying a Warhol everything felt within reach in Buckeye country, when we were 23 I remember you loathing those bleak Chicago winters of 5AM departures and 4PM darkness how we’d hole up in the Peninsula to thaw and wait for summer to come to Dearborn St a bonafide local who knew the bartenders by name you lit the Weber on that small landing off the back of our brownstone that overlooked the parking lot of Holy Name those were the days we made all our best decisions emboldened by a bottle of champagne Take me back to Thompson & Grand where we’d schlep our laundry down the street for lack of a machine, or kitchen counter for that matter in our stitch of SoHo above La Chat Noir where everything we owned touched and the music came up through the floorboards and the recycling truck would wake us up with a waterfall of glass bottles crashing in crescendo we’d walk the length of lower Manhattan at night living in extremes of art and humanity of paycheck to paycheck and relished the glory and barely made it out alive I remember you on Marina Avenue watching the sailors practice on the Bay watching the kids run to Chestnut street watching your cousin run outside the window or your aunt cart all of Austin’s baseball gear to the Green we bought Spruce burgers for every birth and we’d drive to the sun, to the vines, to the hills but life settled in San Francisco when you chose to stay and you grew like a redwood around us spawning a ring I remember you in flight drinking water from a fountain that left you praying for morning on a bathroom floor in Italy dancing all night in Croatia until we all spoke the same language as the rest of the wedding taking off all your clothes to dive into Lake Como when the clock struck midnight at Armando’s buying the watch that launched a thousand adventures near the casino in Monte Carlo skiing through a blizzard in Switzerland that almost swallowed us whole biking our children in a bucket across Amsterdam wait, we’re in Hamsterdam?! the little one cried trudging through sheep fields in the Costwolds to take our boots off and sit in socks by the pub’s smoldering fire I like that us is a series of chances we choose to say yes to sometimes terrified, blinking into the sun I’d do it all again but only with you
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