On Sundays we hold hands. In the usual way, we find each other, sitting side by side. Sometimes I forget and you have to remind me.
On Mondays I make fun of your tuna salad sandwich. All the capers make the bread soggy. You pull a poison control stickerface at my coconut cream pie. Why would anyone want to eat that?
On Tuesdays my dad sings in the style of Bob Dylan, inventing little spontaneous songs about what he observes as we walk. He does his best impersonation, voice loud enough so that people passing us on the street turn back to take in the scene. I always hope I won’t bump into you on Tuesdays.
On Wednesdays you wash the windows, focusing on the front ones facing 7th street. Your family name is engraved into the facade of a bank a few blocks away, and there’s one of those historical placards out front about how your distant relative helped finance the American Revolution. When I walk by, you knock on the glass and lean out the frame to chat with me.
On Thursdays you make sure to leave a real nice comment on at least one of my recent selfies on Facebook. Something like, who needs lightbulbs when the sun has entered the room. I make sure to heart it.
On Fridays we stay up all night in your East Falls apartment, making lines that taste like nail polish remover disappear while a pay per-view ultimate fighting championship loops on your medium screen TV. You tell me about the time you checked yourself into a mental ward for exhaustion and when you realized the gravity of your circumstance you were denied exit so you made the best of it and collected bets from the other patients on how long the hallway was and collaborated on how to take the most accurate measurement walking heel to toe.
On Saturdays we lie in your mom and dad’s bed on the fourth floor of your childhood home after smoking a blunt in the roof deck jacuzzi, overlooking the building where we both went to elementary school. We sleep on opposite ends of the bed and I can feel you looking at me.
On Sundays we hold hands.
Alexandra Naughton’s work has appeared in Dream Boy Book Club, HAD, Burial Magazine, Bruiser Magazine, Post Pop Lit, and Michigan City Review of Books. She is the author of the poetry collections Sick of Being Inside Myself and YOU COULD NEVER OBJECTIFY ME MORE THAN I’VE ALREADY OBJECTIFIED MYSELF and the novel American Mary.