Thirteen Years

I never believed the story you told me about the girl
who came into the bookstore you worked at
and then drowned herself in the ocean a few days later.

You’d avoided her pretty, desperate face in the aisles,
had jokingly recommended Mrs. Dalloway
when she cornered you for books about suicide.

The girl, Virginia Woolf, stones in both their pockets—
it fit too well together. I assumed you were trying
to tell me about yourself but had to use the girl to do it.

That fall, you wrote a poem about the tide bearing her body
away like a bottle with a note curled up inside it.
Our writing group loved that poem. I did too,

even if I didn’t believe it. I wrote tiny poems,
stripped to nouns and verbs, a kind of writing
someone might admire but never love.

We drank wine on beaches, then waded in.
When water weighed down our tights, we tied them
around our necks, sliced our bare feet on stones.

Years later, I asked what had happened
to that poem and you told me you’d tried editing it,
but every line was bad. Every line? I doubted that

the way I doubted the story itself and the others
you’ve told before and since, brimming with coincidence,
characters resurfacing as if in a novel.

We live in separate cities now. Hundreds of people
like the filtered images you share of your life
while I post fewer and fewer photos. We’ve been friends

for thirteen years and I don’t know how many times
you’ve wanted to die. I want you to tell me this fact,
awful as a body hauled in on the tide. Tell me the story

you started years ago, about being cornered by yourself
and laughing your way out of it. Maybe it’s me
who needs passing encounters to mean something,

who can’t just let stories squawk from far-off rocks.
For thirteen years you’ve told me I’m too honest
and I know you’re right. I walk to the beach

to watch the ocean’s great grey breathing and wonder
which stones you would choose, knowing
they’d be indistinguishable from mine.