The Girl in Apartment 5

There’s a girl who lives next door and she does not know that I am in love with her.

To be honest, she does not know that I exist at all. I mean, I imagine that in theory, she has a tacit awareness that a person or persons occupy the townhouse next door to her, and everyone on the block has heard me trying to start my van in the mornings.

There’s a chance she has even seen me when I go out to check the mail or when I take a walk with the kids in the evenings. Yeah, maybe… Maybe she has seen me!

But she does not know me. If I ran into her at Kroger, for example, I would see no flash of recognition in her eyes.

So the girl who lives next door has absolutely no reason to suspect that I am in love with her.

I Left Her for a Concrete Garden Gnome

Dogs or a gnat. Three dimes, Tuesday, or the space where an old lamppost used to stand. Your Uncle Charlie’s left pinky finger. Dust motes or the long, raspy guitar solo from the studio version of “Free Bird.” Or myoclonic jerks. Or the declining entertainment value of the television program, “Homeland.”  

Tell me: Are our loves less worthy than your own? Less deserving of respect somehow? Can you look me in the eyes and say they’re any less central to our being?

Less sacred?

He caught my eye from the other side of the yard of a neighbor of mine. It could have been the hat. It could have been the ants that ran across the surface of his poorly-painted beard. We made love under the full harvest moon and by morning, I knew this was what I’d been born for.

It was who I was. It is who I am. I was born this way, don’t you see?