How I know love.

Checkout lane #4, hand basket filled with Yukons, breakfast links, dozen eggs, mushroom gravy mix: a breakfast that never happens. She's behind me with two pints of Ben & Jerry's & red, swollen eyes. Elizabet. How've you been & she just sort of half-smiles, turns the question back to me. I'm paying & she's still asking questions, makes some comment on having breakfast for dinner & I counter with having 2 pounds of ice cream for same. Conversation touches briefly on music as I remember that she was learning to play the bass the last time I saw her, five months ago, & now she's finished checking out & we are walking to the exit together & she says "I just learnt that my boyfriend's been cheating on me", hugging her Chunky Monkey closer to her chest. What am I supposed to say, she's only seventeen, what am I even supposed to think. & why is she even telling me.

I'm only fifteen & I have no idea what I'm playing with. Hers is the room furthest from the bathroom, the one I'm in shares a wall with it. I hear her walk the dark hallway, open & close the bathroom door so silently she's sure her parent's wont hear or won't be concerned but I hear, & then the medicine cabinet. I don't hear her pee but she flushes the toilet & so I don't hear the pills shaking out of the plastic bottle into her hand nor the cabinet door closing. She walks back through the hallway to her room but leaves her door slightly open. I crawl out from under cotton sheets, sheets wet with anticipation & nerves, her brother just above me, snoring slightly, & on tiptoes navigate via nite-light to her room, where she waits.

She stops the tape, the mixed tape I made her for her birthday, & says "sing me a song". He's gone, off to buy more Sierra Nevada, & she's sitting in front of me, a dark porch at midnight on Patterson street, requesting a song. "Any song will do, just something, just sing for me." "Just try to see in the dark, just try to make it work & feel the fear before you're here. I make the shapes come much too close, I pull my eyes out, hold my breath & wait..." & then he's back & I remember that she's eight blocks away, lying alone in bed while I'm here, breathing in the perfume of this other.

I taught her how to love by getting her off cocaine & giving her reason to stop cutting herself. I taught her how to be hurt & distrustful, & that old habits are the only thing you're left with when you're alone, by singing songs at midnight hours.

I took her in my arms when he got drunk. I took her home & thought I was justified, that he was getting what he deserved, that I was the better man & knew what she needed but she was drunk & I hadn't seen straight for years.

Standing inside a lecture hall as Bobby Seale relived the '70s, I thought of nothing but her. I couldn't even remember having sex. I could barely remember her leaving that morning. But somehow I knew.