Leland Quarterly | Fall 2021
I create myself a continental quilt Katherine Wong We haven’t spoken in a week and two days. Our conversations had taken the shape of a phone line of six-thousand miles, stretching across a gaping Pacific partition. They ran cold after straining several months—the frayed end of a string, unable to glide through the thin opening of a sewing needle. It’s bittersweet, I think: the low-pitched sigh of a hung-up phone call. Three weeks before graduation, I take a stray thread out of our shared sweater and begin to pull. That is my first mistake. A confession that comes several years late, and now, I pick up clocks from the ground to make up for lost time. Your backyard is a valley beneath a possibility-filled sky, saturated with grass and a freshwater stream of pinky swears. I embrace the dip of the basin, the dip of your hips. The thread on this spool is running out. When you leave, the airport has the smell of newly-bought clothes—both alien and artificial against my skin. There is a certain plasticity to your promise (we won’t grow apart, call me everyday, okay?) and a simmering guilt that knows it can’t be kept. You disappear into the jetbridge; I dig my hands deep into the pockets of my jeans and watch our futures diverge in the form of tunnels splitting from the terminal.
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