What excused me then was that I had never wanted to turn back.
Not the cottonwoods, not the June-bronzed grass. One plastic lilac
on the frayed tablecloth I put both my elbows on: that first city I touched,
blistering up and down the hot paved hills with a caveat clutched
like a hand in my hand, two fingers crossed. Just the silhouette
caught my look once. The sweetly indiscernible. So much of it, a favorite
Turkish restaurant and his mom's accent, the one he liked to borrow,
that wrecked year of it, when if I didn’t want today I still had tomorrow.