How To Rebuild A Cathedral

Cathedrals are being rebuilt all over the city. Scaffolding like a neck brace around the bells that strike each hour, vibrations in the beams like a reflex hammer hitting a knee. I go on a walk each day, I watch the men scale the buildings. White siding, blue sky, stained glass getting cleaned. The sun hits on a metal cross posted at the crest of the roofing. A radio is playing, static cutting through the singing. I watch from across the street, men with one palm beneath their paint brushes to stop the dripping.

There is a pomegranate tree. The fruit is rotting. One drops off the branch in front of me, splitting into wet red bits with spongy flesh in between. I think of my front patio, the cherry pits sucked clean. On the longest day of the year, you climbing the stairs of my apartment, sun stretching long and thin against your freckled skin. The two of us, sat across from each other, knees touching. Your skin turning pink, your face shaved clean to soften the spot where it always rubbed against my cheek. I told you that you reminded me of the inside of a peach. I remember never second guessing.

The equilibrium of time reached in December, when the sun sets so early. I received your letter, I spoke to you in both our dreams. I have been there, in your sleep, in my memory, in both our fantasies of phone calls and ships sailing across seas.

There is a light on inside the house. Through the window, a mother is cooking dinner for her son. He’s sitting on a barstool in front of the counter, he is watching her cut vegetables and wash them in the sink. My left shoulder is slumping under the weight of groceries and the impending evening. It is December, it is seventy-three degrees. The warmth of summer followed me south, with all the boxed up books and you in the driver’s seat. The blue dress I wore that one July evening. Perched on the yellow tile, you on your knees beneath me, dinner on the stove, still cooking. Pressed against the door, the wall, the hardwood floor, both of us laughing. The elaborate way you described my body between breaths, up close to my neck, like it belonged to both of us, like we were sharing.

The sun drops beneath another building. A gray faced dog lopes down the steps of the porch, he reads my palm with a wet nose, tells me in three sharp sniffs that something’s coming. He blinks with cloudy eyes, sees something I can’t yet conceive. The hope and handsome memory threading north and south together, folding time up like a bedsheet. I remember pulling blinds closed, pulling you close, all the many futures planned between us before sleep. God and striped cotton shirts, the center of everything.

In the garden, we are planting seeds. Melons and bell peppers and plants that thrive in the humidity. Mindy and I crouch before the soil and speak to the green tails sprouting from little yellow moons quietly. The instinct passed down genetically, from mothers and grandmothers and some distant knowledge adopted accidentally. There is a future in the flesh of fruit, eden or something like it in devotion to a growing thing. Roots stretched out like ribbons in the dirt, a gift wrapped up where we can’t see.

Like the two of us on the phone that day with Katie. How you asked my favorite fruit and she answered for me, “peaches, nectarines.” The stand outside the river where a father and his daughter sold us fruit and honey. The things you know that came before me, a home and a family and grief. All the invisible parts of you packed up and brought south, without me trying. It comes out in conversations with strangers, a wristwatch, a bruise underneath your nail on the day that we first meet.

We are lucky to have known it once, for history is always repeating. There is something worth preserving, scaling months and minutes, shrines to summer’s end and the new year beginning. There is stained glass soldered together in the same shape as you in the kitchen with your mouth pressed against me. Letters stacked like books on the table next to me, reading them in bed the way I read that story from the yellow book one evening. A distant image of us, regret replaced with dream. Heaven is the halfway point, not a place for settling. Time pressed like a head against my chest in the moments before I fall asleep. A hushed voice tells me that there is nothing to fear, tells the body we shared how to care for something you can’t see.