SAME RIVER TWICE

Our bodies write their own memories, you say, rolling towards me across the groundsheet, all hands and smiles and hair. Covering mine with yours. My body, my memories. Over your shoulder, I watch shadows move across the taut green curve of our pop-up tent, shapes made and unmade. The ground is hard beneath me, a faint chill rising through the skin of the sleeping bag into my bones. I imagine my skeleton turning to ice inside me, and then shattering. I can’t lose myself in you, not any more.

You move away, your face side-lit in blue from the screen of your phone as you plot your journey, the peaks and valleys of your blood sugar; energy in, energy out. I watch your hands work, fishing your insulin from the chiller pouch, the small blurry tattoo of a semi colon moving on the inside of your wrist. You make jokes about poets and punctuation, about never knowing when to stop. But I know what it means.

We’ve walked this path before, end to end, finding our own stories in its rough banks and unexpected wildlife, in the easy silence sound-tracked by our matching footsteps, in the drenching pitch of the rain and the welcome return of the