Michelle Li

2014, reframed

after Bob Hicok

The first and only boy who loved me
did so at a time when I did not care for attention.
In the yearbook, there is a photo where he has written
a love letter and I hold it up for the camera. Blonde,
skinny, and hawkish, he let me copy Spanish terms
from his notebook because I was too nearsighted
to see the whiteboard. Once, his father told my father on
a parent night that his family was going through
a divorce. Perhaps those were the days
for love and remarriage, the air up for grabs, when my
parents probably thought about divorce as well
and realized that they wouldn’t have been happier
with anyone else. On the school calendar,
the years said you must be very limited, and fanned
themselves out without stop. I laughed and cried
underneath the same swing set. One summer day,
almost ten years later, I ended up alone on the other
side of the country and thought of him again. In
Boston, I watched girls fling themselves at golden
boys, older men, heard of them drinking handles
of vodka without remorse. That year, the city opened
itself, and when I walked the streets of Italian diners
and film shops, I knew that no one would
come to think of all of this—whatever this was—in
the same way ever again. A late wind on the bus biting
the rutilant horizon, the city ahead glistens with an untouched
temerity, and the grass knows that we—even the popular
ones—will come to die. I wanted to know that night if I
had been given enough love for it to stretch my entire life,
how much of a life I had left, to ask if my childhood
crush what he had written in that card and where
I had lost it, explain to him that I was handed a life
without genius, but I still have to make something
out of this, have to mend these unwielding
limbs into some logical structure, under saturated
limelight, under the gentlest spray of stars. That was
the day I realized you could sit waiting for the
green line to Amory, and still not know which flight,
which decision, which flick of the wrist had pulled
you into a new city. When the traffic ahead
had slurred and slowed, I got onto the platform,
watched the last set of overhead wires come into view.