I guess this is a bit of a prose poem more than actual prose... but it definitely draws on my own life the way a memoir does, so I figured it would fit here.

Dear Lucy,

I thought about you this morning

and I found that I couldn’t remember

the almost accidental lightness

when your fingertips touched mine;

but I remembered how you wrapped your words

around my tongue, like strings of hot wax or honey.

And you said you didn’t know what love was yourself,

and I was going to say I guess I didn’t know either,

but then I remembered seeing you underwater once,

the tips of your hair flickering up the curves of your face.

I thought about a day in my life.

It was the day the willow tree dangled its limbs

in front of the sun like a chandelier,

lights just starting to twitch out.

I watched new lights reveal themselves.

It wasn’t that they weren’t there before,

but the daylight had covered them,

or maybe my eyes had been covered?

Either way, the blur had ascended

and left rising from the ground behind it an earthy coolness.

It smelled like catching fireflies.

And when I laid myself down in the grass and let my head tilt back

into the soft beneath me, I could see the upside-down gatherings of grass,

like a tiny forest hanging out of the sky.

I thought about an evening I invented,

an evening that has me standing in disbelief

on my creaking porch, my bare feet tingling,

the budding coolness sprouting from the earth like a beanstalk;

I look at the sky

where the moonlight outlines the clouds;

every tendril and every fold of every cloud ignites with a fuse of radiance

that burns its way around each silhouette

until the sky behind seems to ripple out from each cloud,

darkening around the edges as the light spreads itself wide.