I wish I had met you when we were both still children

before I got soft from too many years of thinking that articulating my emotions made me special

and before you grew hard from the destructive hours of mistaking your vulnerability for weakness

I wish we had met somewhere in the middle as coarse stones in a tumbler,

making the other’s jagged crags polish smooth our vulnerabilities.

Perhaps as children we could have picked up such stones and propelled them across the water without regard for where they land,

or to whom they may land near,

and whether those new stones were liable to polish them smooth,

before joining each other in the sunflower fields, where I can pick the freckles from your burned shoulders

and you can tussle the hair that the wind disturbs on my head.