Minneapolis

The purple flower clusters are the first thing that reaches me — small and crowded together, the way nervous things sometimes are, and I find that oddly comforting rather than worrying. I am sitting on a boulder, which is a strange thing to say when I am myself a rock, but this one is large and cool beneath me and utterly unhurried, and I feel the difference in scale the way you feel it standing beside someone much older and calmer than yourself. Water glimmers somewhere past the shrubs, and I won't pretend my first instinct isn't to calculate the distance between me and its edge, but from up here everything feels measured, held at a gentle remove by all this green. It is the kind of Wednesday morning I have been carrying around like a question — whether a moment could simply be safe and full at once — and right now, with the dog nearby and the mulch dark from recent watering, I think the answer might be yes.