On a Quiet Porch in East Nashville

     Ivory peeks in from the face of a pale moon. It kisses the curves of Neta's face as her plump,
her cherry, her glistening martini lips part for sighing breaths and belly laughs. She is pomegranate and gold; she is goddess with her curly coif and glamour with her gestures bold, and gestures broad. She is brash. She is acute. Honesty rises and falls inside the walls of her chest--breathes up from behind her collarbone. Her eyes are clear. Her charisma spirals up into the clarity of a still night. We sit folded, and in anticipation--like children--as the stars transfix themselves like illuminated cut-outs against the silk of a navy sky.
  She beams and arches her eyebrow sarcastically, at the interruptions of his voice.

  He is all there.
  I observe him as he reclines casually in his navy, velvet chair.
  He is rugged, and denim. Wisdom hangs itself upon his brow; softness kisses his face. His voice growls up from his Bourbon belly. And he's right about everything. And I want him to always be right...about everything. His chest is a home with a wrap around porch, with loved in couches, and worn in wool throws. I am enamored by his rugged hands that graze his lips as he inhales the coated smoke of a late winter and a Liga Privada.
   Toward my right he poses the question: "So, what is your post graduation plan?" I listen to Kacy's answer. It is flooded with Italy, and unending roads to bound down fearlessly. I gaze up into the night and reflect on when he asked me the same question. He doesn't know that in the small compilation of a few short weeks my answer has dramatically changed. I observe his slooping stoop, the foundational cracks in his concrete paths, the glow of his translucent twinkle lights, and the bridges of his white french door frames.

   "This."
    I respond to myself.
    So much of my life I have merely existed. I have hid between the crevices of fear and mundane expectation. My post graduation plan is to have at least one lopping futon and endless grilled cheeses, to be a refuge for all friends in the fray of melancholy, to bathe my loved ones in berry wine, and to always be able to recommend a new book to read.
      I want to live a full life with peculiar art, and oddly shaped vases, with full cookie jars and breakfast tables full of faces. I want to work to live and never live to work. I want to never find myself between the rigid lines of calculations, or heavy laden beneath the weight of all the days that I never lived. I want to ignite the days with exuberant love, until chaos finds still moments, and conflict encounters resolve, until irrationality reaches the quiet arms of reason, and all the broken bows have made amends.