That party on that New York evening

That evening I met Paul, I had actually run into some of my girlfriends from college. We all reminisced about the coppery breezy skies that enveloped the Boston cold grounds at fall. 

"They looked like..god what did we used to call it?"

"Tinsel!"

"No! It was Santy santy Claus gold foil"

"That holds the secrets of the Earth, middle, beginning and end"

It was all becoming so familiar. And anyways, I thought to myself, we all search for the familiar everywhere we go. We want the familiar in strange places. 

We were all gathered round this pretty book-case. I remember seeing Anna Karenina poking out in her worn out, dishevelled dress of a book-cover. Intimately flustered like Anna herself. A piece of book cloth off shoulder or something. I wanted to keep smiling at Paul but I was also enjoying the conversation. 

Book cloth. What is that?

Paul would know; he's an editor. Paul was the kind of life choice you can't take back. Paul divided my life in two. 

I remember meditating in mid-sentence about the joys of friendship, without the mingling of romantic love. The small piece of time where laughing with my friends was more than enough. 

*

"Remember that essay about Tess D'Urbervilles I wrote a while ago in college?"

"You should publish it" Paul enunciates through toothpaste and sleepy hair sleepy face this evening. He remembers how dramatically I had read it to him on the Persian carpet, with orange peel littered everywhere and my legs legs legs going on forever by the embroidered silk dear eyes. My favourite thing about reading him that essay was the beginning of paragraphs. I would begin strong: "The aesthetic appeal of Tess asleep at Stonehenge superimposed with the dreamy quality of the quintessential English sleepy towns..."

I don't know why I pick fights with the person I love most on this planet. I probably feel like this is the end. This is it and the demons must be exercised. 

*

There is a small pearl tucked underneath the sea

the girls don't know

its value

the boys don't know 

it's there.

I only found it by mistake when I turned this

world upside down

and stripped the colours off the folly

bare bare bare. 

I pretend to be curious 

about its origin

but trade it in for cash

and know it won't be

"fair" fair.