This perfect friend. Someone who moved right up against me in a flagrant display of connection but didn’t need a single word of conversation. Someone made from the sun on my back.
Sometimes it is less unfurl and more unhinge. Less bloom and more burst. Less flower and more fever.
I bend my knees, narrow my eyes and make a diorama of the real world. On a narrow city block, my horizon grows wide with wild. A muddy river flows along the lush green of its far bank. A gurgling stream merges into it, hidden beneath a canopy of mossy trees. The sky is full of birdsong. The air is freshly washed.
At first, you don’t know how to be. You don’t even know how you want to be. You bust out with a bit of organized chaos. Then get tired and try tender. You play with bright but shy. Uncertainty undoes you every time. And then you try surrender.
My favorite park is everybody’s favorite around here. So instead, I walk down streets I haven’t been down in decades. I walk to the very end of the dead ends. I slop through muddy, potholed passages barely trying to be streets. I stop and look up.
Some days can be lightened with blocks full of magnolia blooms and parents playing with their kids. Some days a tear-shaped hole in the hood of a burnt-out car is a perfect match for everything else.
Night arrives. Ducks move from sky to water with a clean slice. The moon teases in and out of the clouds and the park sighs with a satisfied exhaustion. We circle the reservoir like an almost forgotten ritual, marking the end of another unnamed day.
Tracy Burkholder 
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