Honeybees and the Flower Rose Marie

The rosemary flower blooms in purple beneath the shade of Spanish broom. Between the thinness of greener thistles, the honeybees between the petals. Like metal to a magnet, we find our furry friends barreling through the air, making movements unplanned and errant, lacking direction, crash landing in the violet. I was sitting on the steps, watching them dodge my fluctuations. If I stay completely still, they fall all around me like leaves from Chinese elms. The sun is saving his harsher rays for next year, and now the sky is just blue, plain, and empty, no clouds from here to Cascade Locks. Is the azure truly a reflection or the collection of molecules and wavelengths? The answer is irrelevant as I traverse down 21st toward the post office and warehouse graveyard. There’s a point where the Fremont stands against the distant overpass, behind the long stretch of concrete that forms two lanes going east to west and back again. I took a beat and waited for someone I assumed to be you, thumbing through my Rolodex of all the memories, past and present. I wonder if you see me too. How could it be? You’re over there, and I’m over here; it’s an intercity catastrophe. Your figure had longer hair and a new tattoo, same gait and a dog. If I was you, I’m not sure I’d like to talk to me either. Opposition to a natural separation that should have been enough. Sticky severance and unneeded pain, demoralizing dialogue and the ugliness of a desperate man. A year on, and I’m chasing ghosts, watching bees collect pollen from rosemary flower, sitting still and tracking the sun. Trying to place your tattoos I traced with my fingers, I find only void in another. The hair a little longer, but nothing time can’t account for. I dreamt of our old apartment, amazing how I remember the smallest of detail. My brain clings to vases and floral patterns, the gold lockbox faded and entrusted to pass down the line, the handles on the cabinets, and your hair in the sink. I recall the layout so clearly, as if I go back every now and again. I was an intruder in a home not made for me, feeling your noticeable absence. I made sure not to disturb a single fiber, except the bed I made before leaving, just like I never did. I used the old hair tie you gave me before I left the island; I wear it on my wrist sometimes to tie back the hair that’s grown down past my ears and shoulder blades.

I have a new method now, the siren song quiet and dull. When I look back, it is only with vision. How I used to long to return there, to where the only conflict was that in our future, far off from the shore of our boundary. Letting it all rest now, there is no shortage of sleep, no shortage of words in our book left unopened and bound to the shelf of our former life.

Back in the land of honeybees and the flower Rose Marie.