Dysfunction Is Generational

I broke the cycle
by opting out,
by freezing in time.
It won’t continue.
It won’t unravel.
Permanent pause, no inheritor of my distance,
no lover for my mistrust,
no voice welcoming me at my end.
But the years will see me through—
aging, my age-old companion.

Every day I see
the young growing up,
the grown up growing old,
human joy perpetuating against all odds.
You make your coffee,
you take good notes,
you sing with the radio on the way to the gym.
You bake a birthday cake for your mother—
maybe it’s burnt sugar chiffon,
or maybe it’s a chocolate raspberry
sheet cake made from a box.
Anyway, it’s beautiful—
even if no one tells you.

Years later, you will go to the seaside,
you will stand at a bus stop under a red parasol,
you will catch a cold,
you will dance a foxtrot,
you will leave your headphones on the train,
you will make a perfect meringue and forget to take a picture.

A friend will give you starter for sourdough
and teach you how to care for it.
Even bread, she’ll say, needs to be fed.

You will learn that there is nothing to be afraid of,
and that there is always time enough.

You will fall in love again,
first with yourself,
and then with the lover who knows how to love you,
and then with the idea of growing old together.
You will stand in the concert hall
listening to the woodwinds warm up and
you will wonder how you could ever have been so sad—

But I—

I will build a shack in the desert.

And I will talk back to the coyote until
I lose my voice for the last time
in a hot dusty night as white as the moon.

And I will stand aside for what I could never welcome,
that it may pass unremarked into
the circle of someone else’s arms.