i'm on the balcony with [a] Perfect Reflection

Trying to find the right pressure at which to hug someone is not an exact science. Too much said clingy, too little said you didn’t care. So I hugged her as she sat fully clothed on her faux satin bedspread, still in her smart downtown businesswoman dress wear, legs dangling and kicking as she sobbed about her new apartment, the one she just realized was made for one, not two.

I buried my head in her hair and like it always does the smell reminded me of the first time we brought wood to her old place, muscling it up three flights at her complex, lumbering the dolly up one stupid little concrete step at a time. It had been the first time I tasted her outdoors, leaning her up against the pickup in the gravel driveway outside her parent’s house, lost in hot breaths and clumsy fingers going too fast. I remember the hair, how it smelled… purple… and smoky, a mysterious fog hanging over the bog waiting for a sun that never came to burn it away.