after the songs and music videos for Blackstreet’s “Don’t Leave Me”, Sisqo’s “Incomplete”, and Aaliyah’s “Try Again”

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In years spent cross-legged under the guiding light of MTV, Lisa Franking my notebook and coating my lips in pink lemonade Lip Smackers just so I could lick it off, the 90s, in all their wisdom and generosity, prepared me for two things: quicksand and heartbreak. I left them ready to sing, fist to chest, brows plucked and pinched, pocket full of polaroids. Ready to build my very own monument to longing. To haul myself up its sharp edges and teeter there until the corners of the frame darkened to vignette. Romance and the epic of its loss was mythology. The tower was made of women’s faces. Every tower was made of women’s faces, as though that was all we had to be wary of, but there are entire infinities that can, without preamble, take the center piece of me. Backyard canoe. Sidewalk sleeping bag. November bee bent at the false altar of my peony tattoo. Not once did my Discman get snagged on the way the body grows more translucent than a body should be and I, alone, crooned a high note in honor of the orange cat. R&B taught me how to fall, howling, to the grass, how to bottle feed a white tiger, how to defy gravity, to try again, again, again, but there were too many mansions and not enough mentions of the sexless wreckage of unannounced lasts: braiding the silken silver of my grandmother’s hair, holding my father’s hand and feeling small, or my son’s and feeling big enough to block the wind. And there is always wind. As for quicksand, it never looks the way it did back then and it turns out there’s no point in fighting it. You have to be willing to go under. It’s all love asks of you. The only thing your one life wants.