Prodigy Comes Home

The object was to move.
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So I spun: north, west, south, and east, searching for my center.

My first stop was a ferry terminal in Seattle where passengers came and went. Autumn afternoons ended early, and the promise of good coffee kept your eyes open in the rain.

The object was to move higher, so I flew North for the summer.
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I arrived at a train platform in uptown Chicago and stared at the silhouette of rooftops back-lit by neon marquees. It was slam poetry night. I met a girl who I began writing about, the kind that smiled at you to be polite and never wrote back. I rode the Red Line back to an empty hotel room, invisible as the wind they named the city after.

The object was to move together, but I found myself drifting.
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I drove to a church in D.C. for a spring wedding that wasn't mine. I stumbled out of the reception hall into a back alley bar named “Sovereign”.

I froze on a bus stop bench in Milwaukee, below the Christmas lights that hung in the dead trees of an abandoned park.

I dragged my baggage in circles through crowded airports, looking for my gate.
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The object was to keep moving. I got nowhere.

As a weeknight dinner conversation, I’d remind my daughter of the beaches we left behind in Florida.

​We’d sit by the window of our 4F apartment in Raleigh while the spaghetti got cold.

"Look how far away the sidewalk is from here," she’d comment.

​We’d point at the tail lights of a passing car as if its glow was worth following.

I’d tell her that shiny objects vanished like the moon if you looked for too long.

I dreamed of moving in all directions, eyes shut to how the lights inside a home revealed everywhere I could hope to go.