“Ok, I’m Finally Ready to Say I’m Sorry for that One Summer” by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

when I watched American Pie 2 twice a week & listened to all nine minutes of “Konstantine” on the way to every party with the sun still out in a car thick with sober voices spilling out of the windows & making another mess all over the sidewalks. I guess this is what it looks like when youth is writhing on its deathbed but the boys who claim it are still very much alive & blooming & being split in half by a beam of moonlight stumbling in through a window and falling all over the sheets in a bed that is not ours. In the heat of that summer, I escaped the parties on Friday nights to find the near-silent bedroom of a girl who I pretended to stop talking to when my friends said we’re college guys now, but who I used to shoot hoops with in the backyard & skipped out on prom to go record shopping with last spring & that summer, we would sit on her floor & let the Supremes record play all the way through twice & tell each other stories about how our college roommates snored all year & how we didn’t sleep like we used to under this city’s moon & how we never got used to eating alone & how we instead got used to hunger & how small we’ve become because of all these things & then we would lay with each other without ever touching & I didn’t know how to talk about distance out loud & in the mornings over breakfast with the guys when Jeff would yell how was it last night across the table & I knew what it carried even then & I still smiled into a brown tornado of coffee until the plates rattled with fists pounding & laughter & high fives & isn’t it funny how silence can undress two bodies & press them into each other? & when I say funny I mean the feeling that stretches itself out in your stomach while you watch someone cry into their palms & turn their face to the night before they walk away from you for what you know is the last time before there is new sharp & boundless city between the both of you forever & when fall came, boys sat up in their beds alone & gasping while their hearts rattled out the ghosts of every unspoken love that dragged them there & then a whole country crawled itself across the ocean & went to war.