Photos by Chema Madoz

I first met her grieving on the bathroom floor
the peeling sea-green paint revealed an ashy grey wood and
her too,
wide open in the house that smelled of pipe tobacco, stale beer.

It was funeral March and May as well,  
When her feet hurt her mother would yell
and I watched her blank stare strangle some guttural shout but
all I could do was wring my hands

There's a gentleness to mental disorders
makes them so hard to catch –Comely women letting their hair loose and then
recoiling from a slapped hand or
me cowering in a pool of my own blood
and something to do with yellow wallpaper.

There were evenings in Europe,
the sun still hesitant to dip into the Mediterranean at half-past nine
she was young enough to be a stranger,
skipping stones and pouting with her belly pushed out like a wild thing

She doesn't remember it now,
She asks us to forget it too,
and we all do in our own way.

Last year she arrived, suddenly
flooded with emotion, indigence, and thought
but then
it all went south,
frothing at the mouth, I saw no gleam inside her eyes

Instead the days burst out like playing cards and in them I was still running down Cambridge Drive at 3 a.m. stomach aching from laughter, in the car listening to music uncomfortably loud with all the windows down, blowing past our house until a fraction of the love,
the lead weight in my gut,
might make like dust picked up by a street sweeper that passed
on the morning I was holding someone's hand
and
when she asks me if it's ever going to get any better I say
well, yes
and no