This week’s episodes are guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Myka Kielbon, and this is The Slowdown.

Several years ago, I was consumed by a summer romance. The two of us were both in limbo in our lives, and we escaped into each other. It was hard not to spend as much time as we did together, to not disappear for the whole weekend every weekend and pretend I didn’t have responsibilities to my friends, to my family. I was sure I was in love.

One Sunday where we did part ways before the last possible moment, I went home to have some time alone. To catch some air. That evening, I went for a long walk by the beach. It had been gray and muggy all day, but the sun broke through slightly as it started setting behind the Olympic Mountains. The sky turned a startling swirl of peach and lavender. Blackberries in the medians were plump. I walked past a teenage couple laid out on a blanket in yellowed grass, looking deep into each other's eyes and giggling, clearly unaware that anyone else existed on earth at that moment. It seemed like, from horizon to horizon, everything and everyone was in the glow of summer romance.

I felt so much yearning, so much longing. And at the same time, I knew I needed that evening alone. To let the feelings sink into my bones, to relish the workings of desire on me and to feel swept up in what could be ahead of us. Even though, I’d later find out, none of it would come to be.

Loss of possibility is one of the greatest heartbreaks we can face. But today’s poem knows the bittersweet secret: that our memories of the possible are ours to keep.

Rain
by Jennifer Grotz

Sometimes I dream too vividly,
I go to be with my dead, I wake
and they’re still alive in my mind
so I stay there; the longer I am here,
the more I shuttle back and forth, the harder
to say what living is. It’s almost like reading:
the part your eyes read, and the part
you see in your mind. Right now

it’s to be by an open window, 
midnight in September, rain
falling in Warsaw, looking down from
a hotel room at a neighborhood
under renovation, shiny black roads
that invite your gaze, construction cranes 
and whispering lindens. To exist on earth,
if you are lucky, is to be alone 
then with loved ones, or with loved ones
and then alone, to walk streets among
strangers, to speak the language
or not, to stare for hours into a screen

that didn’t exist in childhood, or, just now, 
to feel cool wind twist around bare ankles, 
rain echoing below, drops landing in
little claps, a steady, somnolent applause,
it is a sentence, a syntax that continues,
a spell of little letters, a voice, 
a connection made with the beloved’s eyes,
how that sustains, how it comforts, how
it prolongs one’s longing, how it’s almost 
too simple to say. And too strange.

One recognizes it again
when it rains. It velvets the air.
What doesn’t ever actually happen
is no small part of being alive. 

"Rain" by Jennifer Grotz from STILL FALLING © 2023 Jennifer Grotz. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press.