Closing the Distance

I am distracted, sitting in the library,

by the smell of a girl 

on my fingers. If I went to the bathroom

and opened my pants I would

smell her there as well. 

We will never see each other again,

we never even exchanged numbers,

but I cannot do anything 

in that moment but smell her on

me and remember the way our

bodies collided, our hips cracked,

our parched mouths met, our sweat

mingled on a mattress on the floor

in the sunlight, our hairs matted.

She is not the girl I will wake up 

beside for years, that I will

race across town in the dead of night

in the rain to find an 24-hour

pharmacy for because she got

food poisoning at her cousin's 

wedding and spent hours throwing up, 

that I will end up sewing with needle

and thread the gash in her knee from

when she tripped running up the stairs

to tell me she had been transferred

to Portland, that I moved to Portland

with because the idea of not being 

in the same bed, in the same shower, 

eating off the same dishes, our dirty

laundry not swirling around like

cotton candy was a thought akin to

letting cancer win. Eventually, of course,

it did, and the chemicals and hope

we poured into a finite bowl of ourselves

proved insufficient, and I went back

to the library, and sat in the same chair

and held my hand to my face and inhaled

deeply, a different scent filling my head,

making my vision swim, the smell of

rhododendrons in the arboretum

in Portland, where I took her for her

birthday, and where I looked out and her

in the green fields surrounded by pink,

white, purple blossoms, each one vulgar and

tawdry beside her, each one a crumpled tissue

on a stem, and the sunlight coming down

and the birds singing, and every little thing

in this miserable unheaven was perfect

and thought, So this is love.