To the young man who loved my tendencies for fructose

There is orange juice cracked into the dimple of your couch. I’m sure it’s still there; it’s been there since we were seventeen, when we slept all summer like Siamese moths, wings stitched tight with sweat beads, and Lucy meowed to get out of your room every morning. Sometime in deep July she knocked that box of orange juice onto the palm of your head. I woke up in the usual salt; you, with your head stuck to it’s hair, in sweet. Pulpy morning and bulbous, heavy night wove the summer into the thickest braid, and we stuck to each other like orange juice to your forehead. You always had that plum in your pocket, until the plaid couldn't waltz anymore, couldn't reach the small of a stitched back and you were always suddenly fifty-five cents short of another plum. Your mother bought you new jeans in August. The tumors on the sides of your hips were back and god, I remember your mother’s voice even, like cellophane crumbling over a telephone line. (They're going extinct, you know? ) She always was smoking Fine Wines and Spirits out of their stock of blacks, always yapping like a nervous foot tapping tile on her lemon speckled telephone. Polka dotted armchair even, polka dancing around it, the blinds cutting her into light strips, like when you cut the edges of a paper into an Indian fringe. You could always hear the space around her breathing with her, the graphite of the hallway's height chart fading in hums. But she knew your inches like she knew your home. And once you told me, “home is a place in your head, Jackie,” and it made sense like home makes sense, but like ovals never did; makes sense like the need to swallow the fruit fly before breaking open the orange rind.