And I thought maybe I’d never seen two boys jump like this, just pogo with fervor and heart and ten year old delight through two dozen songs - crying out those lyrics like they wrote them last night. Like they’d finally found how to say what they’d always meant. Just in time.

And this mean thought occurred to me: What if life is too brief to love people who can’t say what they mean.

And I nodded my head forward and back, kept their southern time with my knee. Brushed at the heat creeping up out of my dress and scarf and clinging unruly hair strands to my forehead, to the corner of my mouth. Wondered where all our words go. What happens to the old I love you’s, I want someone to tell me. Are they retracted by breakups or is there some universal half life? Do they drift by Borneo and Omsk, relevance dissipating by the week? Is there some rural refuse heap for words no longer felt?

And what of the people you love who can’t love you back. What of the declarations sent to guarded ears and formal hearts never quite ready to choose you back. Are they air off windshields? Letters coldly returned to sender. Old lovers ducked away from before eye contact in dark bars with new dates. Avoided. Maybe I’d thought they were kept in queue. For the right time. Maybe I’d never considered that they could just fall to feet. Dust back to dust.

I’ve been thinking about the people who want to love each other in this world. And maybe there are many. Maybe there are too many to stay so loyal, so in love with possibility that never seems interested in hatching. for you.

I want these burned down, heart broken, offered up words. These words of merit and trying. Again. Or no song at all.