September 8, 2015

the instruction manual

You should have seen us, sweaty in the kitchen after the mosquitos drove us in,
Labor Day evening on the cusp of the first full week of school. Maybe
it was the wrong time to finish the assembly of a basketball hoop gifted
so many months before, a task we must have been avoiding for this reason -
the failure of the literature tucked into the large cardboard box. How we squinted
at the tiny renderings on each page, pinching bolts in our fingers in the vague hope
that we would know, by feel, which ones fit. And how easy it was, instead, to open
the old wounds of everything else we'd struggled to put together, those frantic triages
that hadn't stopped the bleeding. Now, we are sprawled on alcove tiles, verging on a similar
disaster. And yet, it is this same failure fueling us now, our skin still bruised, still tender.