In high school, I wanted love to be a placid blue lake, even if sometimes the wind seizes and overturns a rowboat. I still do, I think.
I met Lenny four years ago in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. February, a leech crawling on my skin. Barely a month earlier I had been in love, Roger, who informed me after New Year’s Day that he was no longer in love, I shouldn’t take it badly.
I packed up our affair and put it in the trash with broken Christmas tree ornaments. Each year fewer remain. I’m clumsy. I break things. Maybe I break people too. I decided to leave Parkside behind for a day or two. Usually I cursed groundhogs as they ate many of my favorite garden plants. I drove up to Punxsutawney craving an early spring. Maybe groundhog Phil knew something I didn’t. I could hope. Emily Dickinson said hope has feathers. It might have fur and live in a burrow too.
Lenny had decided to do the same thing. He lived closer, just outside of Allentown. When we got together he said that love was like a venus flytrap. It closed over you and you died. This didn’t sound encouraging, but it happened fast. At the motel. Neptune takes 165 years to orbit the sun. I figure Lenny and I have a long way to go yet. Like Neptune, I can be cold and windy.
Each year we go to Punxsutawney and rent the same room where we first got all conjugal. Slow or fast, spring comes. We orbit together. Like Phil, sometimes we need more sleep.
Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is a retired gay writer living in Pennsylvania with his husband. His new book is called Raylene And Skip (Wolfson Press). His work has appeared in: Nimrod, Hawaii Review, Spoon River Quarterly, Amsterdam Review, Mudfish, and elsewhere.
