Dina and Dan Get Clean

Something about the way that legs hit pavement, we are stumbling around the city translucent and immediate. We can only imagine what it is like to love one another whole heartedly. In the morning, we edge to the frame of the building, bang on the iron door twice, wait until a basket is lowered from the burned out window by a jump rope that is fraying at the ends where there was once wooden or plastic handles. The basket lowers and we dip our hands into it and pull out little crystalline packages and shove them deep into our coat pockets, we have the same pea coat red but different sizes, different buttons, long, to our knees. Demented siblings. Twins gnawing the same umbilical cord.

I enter your parents home and it is winter, always winter, the door to the kitchen closed, the slow slope down to the basement where you no longer live, your father now occupies the downstairs, your mother still sleeps in the cupboard upstairs and so you have the whole middle floor at your disposal. Your mother wakes you early and you throw up in the kitchen sink because you took everything that was in the crystalline baggies all at once and then just stopped and that's what happens when you just stop, you puke in the kitchen sink.

It is always winter, the pine tree in front of your parents house is hundreds of feet tall, it gets taller every single time I see it, every single time I remember. The walk from the road to your parents house gets longer, the driveway is more steps to take when really it isn't, when really do we have the same parents, did we come from the same womb. Your old dog died and your parents replaced it with a new dog that looks exactly like the old one only younger. You had that dog since you were a child in Jackson, Michigan. That other dog smelled so bad, you couldn't have her on the bed anymore, but you did anyway because, at one point, it was the only thing that loved you. Your pillow would smell like her stink and you would pull it closer to your body, pull it closer to your nose, you would inhale that stench even after she died. Once she died, this new dog, this younger dog, it is not the same. This new dog sits in the middle of the house with you but doesn't love you like the old dog did. This new dog yips when you enter the front door, making it impossible to slip in and out of the front or back doors at night.

Election year and outside of the house is a sign for whoever the republican candidate is. You get a text message from a long lost number that says, I passed your parents house today and they had this sign in the front yard and you respond, and you are surprised? Plus, I don't even know who this is. They are offended. We have been down to the burned out house with the basket by the rope many times this week. Our mother asks Are you shooting up again? Please tell me the truth. I can see it in your eyes, you are shooting up again.