The Kaleidoscope of a Clown

Acorns and golden leaves dotted the path before us, your hand cradling mine like a mug around warm tea. The steam was our breath, hot and kissing. A hidden walkway just for us in those woods behind your house. “…I was so stoned…” But the school hallway trod a different path, stained in peer footprints and slurs from the acquaintances you shunned when alone with me but high-fived when passing on the football field. I carved your name into my desk. “…I don’t remember a thing…” You built a wall in those woods where we walked - erected it with bricks made from shame and cement that turned my giddy mouth into a well of stones, grey. The stream that runs at the bottom of your garden still holds those stones we skimmed. “…I was so drunk…” It became a eulogy, a refrain you told me after we stared too longingly or our faces caressed; a mantra you lived by publicly when privately your walls were invisible to me. My thornless vines wanted only to shore up the cracks you felt inside yourself. “…I don’t remember even seeing you at the party…” Years later at the reunion the auditorium still smells the same. A scent of sweat and plastic chairs hovers in the air, mingling with the memories of your lips upon mine. You turned my sun upside down. My moon was no longer white but painted the kaleidoscope of a clown. “…I can’t feel this way about you, not right now…” The porchlight flickers outside your house still, a firefly’s electricity dimming. I wonder what would have happened if we had just been together, been free to be together. Yesterday, I walked back amongst those dropped acorns and autumn leaves. Your wall was gone.