Soon

If I can just get past this hour
I thought
If I can just get past this day
I thought
If I can just get past this night
I thought
If I can just get past this week
I thought
If I can just get past this month
I thought
If I can just get past this year
I thought
If I can just get past this
list
This meal
This haircut
This brisk walk
This book of short fiction
This homemade thank-you card
These instructions from the dentist
These Five Things You Should Do To Improve Your Chances
This shopping bag that will certainly split but not before I reach the front door
This charmingly inconvenient, red-faced child, squawking in the middle of the pavement
This recipe so obscure that it might as well call for the distilled tears of one hundred virgins
This godforsaken iPhone app posing as a spirit level but, really, does that look even nearly right?

Soon

This incomparable patience, waiting for me, to just get past this fence, to just crawl through this hole, to just
join the rest of them, as the cool waves slip through their fingers and lap at their faces; as the water’s surface holds the melting haloes of their hair; as their blurry legs paddle, sometimes colliding with one another’s below the glinting top; as they all laugh and gulp water into the soft bulges of their cheeks, only to fire it back out with force at one another, then laugh some more; and as they think in the sun – soft and vague – about what it is that they might like to have for lunch.