Balloon, One

I was washing a pan. That's the part I keep returning to —

not the birthday, not the years of almost-nothing between us,

just the pan I set down wet on the counter

when your text came in, because I couldn't

hold both things at once.

Happy birthday. And then the balloon.

One. Yellow, I think, though that might be me

filling in something the emoji doesn't carry.

I've met you twice. Once at a funeral

where we were both peripheral, wore the same expression —

the look of people related to the grief

without being at the center of it.

Once for coffee, which lasted forty minutes

and ended with both of us saying we should do this again

and meaning it a little less than we wanted to.

There's a whole life in the phone I'm holding.

Your apartment. What you eat for breakfast.

Whether you sleep with the window open.

The balloon is floating in the message thread

like it's trying to cross a room that has no floor,

and I typed thanks, and then I picked the pan back up,

and the water on the counter had already spread

to the edge. I watched it

before I wiped it.