Half a Cookie

I had been given a two-tier question.

The first answer came
almost without thought.

The second followed me home.

Loudly.

Waiting.

Then, where does the love go?

I thought,
surely age would know.

I did not.

Then—

a little tug at my side.

I looked down...

past the mother,
past first kisses
and first leaving,

past the years when love
began sending ransom notes
and collecting consequences,

past even when death
made a conversation
a monologue,

past all the places
where I learned to ask,

Am I enough?

And there she was.

A little girl
who had not thought
to ask anyone that yet.

She was busy.

There were games to play.

I inquired anyway.

Where does the love go
when you give it to somebody
but they are not with you?

She looked at me
for a moment.

“It stays with them.”

I waited.

Apparently,
I had expected footnotes.

“With them where?”

“Inside.
Like in their belly
or their heart.”

She wasn't particular
about anatomy.

Then, because I was still standing there
with all my grown-up words gone,

she added,

“Love is a cookie. You share.
You break it in half for a friend
sitting beside you because
they didn't have a cookie.”

My restraint gave way
to a giggle.

And then it hit me—

softly.

We knew this once.

A friend moves away.

Somebody's mother
calls them home.

The streetlights come on.

Summer ends.

Later, we would spend years
trying to negotiate with endings.

We would call it closure.

We would search backward
for the moment something changed,

as though the ending
had been given authority
to rewrite everything
that came before it.

She knew none of this.

Thank God.

She knew games.

Tag.

Cards spread across a floor.

The delicious injustice
of changing a rule
because you were losing.

And she knew
that if someone you really liked
sat beside you
without a cookie,

and you had one,

you broke it.

That's all.

Maybe it broke evenly.

Maybe it didn't.

Maybe you looked at both halves
and gave away the bigger one

because you loved them.

Maybe you kept the bigger one

because you were five
and you also loved cookies.

Either way,

they had some.

You had some.

There were crumbs.

There were sticky fingers.

There was enough.

And suddenly
I could see them—

all the pieces.

Not returned to me
when something ended.

Not gathered into
some great lost-and-found of love.

Still out there.

A little of me
in people I haven't seen
for decades.

A little of them
here.

Somewhere behind one of the doors
down that long corridor of my mind,

tucked into drawers
I rarely open,

filed beneath names
I no longer say aloud.

A laugh.

A song.

The smell of someone's house.

Perhaps we are all
walking around like this—

carrying pieces.

Half a cookie

we shared
many, many moons ago.

With Grace & Ink,
                        Mai