Distraction,
distraction is all this is, I feel,
as the slimey soap slides all over my fingers
daring to drop off the the plastic bubble wand set
as wasted liquid onto the concrete. The little bags
of goo in my head struggle to switch focus between
the blaring setting sun just behind him, the neon magic-maker
that I’m holding, and the jovial chaos in the in-between.
I want to hear the unknowingness in his laugh as I wave my arm
back and forth to capture nothing from something, to create
the most fragile of things, joy, but, they both elude me. Instead,
I think of all the things I think that I think that I should say,
my mind spun up by some cliche social media dictum: “the person
you are now is the person you would have felt safe with as a kid.”
A difference in time, but the same age, he and I, when we lose a grandmother,
and the kid in me then feels for the adult he may become. Will he be
riddled with guilt as the trimming hand of time snips memory thin,
consuming what once was so visceral? In my mind, in the absence
of any detail about her, I sit, alone in my childhood bedroom, and
realize that when I had so few questions but so many feelings,
I did anything to keep from letting them out, from letting them
through. Will my silence now be the snake that eats itself, or
will my prying further close the clamshell? Is there even the pearl of grief
at all, or was he spared this cursed gift? Before I have the  time
to answer, his cacophany redirects me to the glistening trap I’ve managed
to produce, a globular existence that floats upward on the wind. Watching him
watch its haphazard choreography, longing for the moment of its bursting,
yet anxious that it may hold together just a little longer, I realize
the distract feeling is mine, alone.