after Nghi Vo

When we were twelve, the river overflowed, and the glassy surfaces of your house mirrored the flood with obtuse-angle refractions. Drowning on dry land, we swam across the mirage, trying to hold the current between our thighs. You had nicked your brother’s portable radio, which always played “Hallelujah” no matter what station we tuned to. I laughed at your ability to enchant the dial according to your outdated musical preference, but you only shrugged and didn’t explain. I loved all the ways you were inexplicable.

On the way home, towels slung over our soil-stained shoulders, we saw your brother standing in the window, looking at the water, looking at us. I didn’t know which, or maybe he was just angry about the radio; but we went the opposite way up the grass. After that, I always saw our lives moving in perpendicular directions, falling away from some intimate danger, even if it meant you danced along the edge of an abyss and flirted with the water below. Time after time, I hauled you back, heartsick, submerged, promising to change, and time after time minus one, it was enough.

Only when I was too old, it was too late, did I understand your longing to divorce yourself from this unfriendly land: you once told me Jeff Buckley’s blood ran clear in the slipstream. You told me he didn’t mean to die. Perhaps you believed it would be enough to lift the surface over your head in baptism and rebirth, filling your lungs with the illusion of light.