levee

i sent you an olive branch but it got lost in the mail. i wanted to write about how girls are like ginkgo trees but i couldn’t follow the thread of the metaphor. i know it’s there, somewhere, ariadne’s spool in the labyrinth. my friends who no longer live here and i sit in a diner booth at a dive bar winding whiskey around our wounds. we agree that love is rare. how many permutations of this story have you heard? how many can i mend? i walk home on a crunchy carpet of yellow and brown because ginkgos release their leaves all at once. i’m thriving and struggling and both are true and both are valid and i’m retraining my brain not to tip the scales to the negative every day. i love the way women look after each other. ginkgos are nearly three hundred million years old and somehow can tolerate pollution and impure soil. a manger who was not my manager once said to me that i would never admit my well was dry, i would just promise to hold it open overnight and collect the dew for you the next morning.

ariadne betrayed her father and killed her brother for a man who abandoned her on an island the moment she fell asleep. do we find love, or does it find us?