You got drunk last night when I took you out for your birthday. It was just you and me out for a drink until you took up talking pilsners with the bartender and ordered pints until pissed.

“Did you know gravity propagates at the speed of light?” you blurted on the drive home. “The constant! The universal speed limit!”

I thought we were more Newtonian. Equals and opposites.

“If the sun disappeared right now, we wouldn’t stop orbiting it for eight some-odd minutes, until everything goes dark.”

Your talk of constants and darkness reminded me of Joni Mitchell, the song you sang in the shower the morning after we first slept together. I reached the second verse in my head before I realized you were still talking.

“Always thought we’d fly off on a tangent line.”

“If something followed a star around for years after the light went out,” I interrupted, “how far apart would that make them?”

“Not sure the example is sound, but light-years, I suppose.”

In bed, you snored the way you always do when you drink too much.

Downstairs before dawn, today, the bathroom mirror reflects the gravity of heavy years: striations across my surface, bulges at the equator, dark rings under the orbits of eyes; while upstairs, the corporeal impression stamped on my side of the mattress performs a bittersweet progression of simple harmonic motion, calculating the residual weight of the forgotten body to derive the exact moment you will know I am gone.

I can grow grass in the middle of a drought and, as my father liked to joke, sell said grass to people with allergic rhinitis (which was just a fancy way to say ‘hay fever’.)

It started when I was ten; it was an accidental discovery. Inside a pot she had me and my younger brother decorate with sloppy strokes of stiff paintbrushes, my mother planted white roses she bought from the local nursery.

My parents struggled with our lawn that year, but at least the roses made the drab, dusty brown terrain look less like a graveyard—or perhaps more like one (I suppose that is a matter of perspective.)

I was outside one day, buzzing with bees and literally stopping to smell the roses, when a thorn pricked me. My blood fell like a raindrop into the dirt, and naturally—being an over-dramatic child—I ran to my mother, sobbing.

The following day there was a patch of the thickest, greenest grass you could ever imagine. I do not suppose I need to spell out the reason.
I am an adult now, and I have moved into my parents’ old place. I forgot how it was. I forgot how I hung up missing posters for our dog as a teenager, knowing very well where I had bled old Spot dry. The garden keeps demanding more. My brother is visiting tomorrow, and I doubt he will see the likes of his own backyard again.