i.
There is a place in Spain she tells me
a city built on top of itself and over again
like a Borges story
She tells me in excited confidence, like it’s where I’ll have to go to find her, like she’s still there, waiting
ii.
We hop out of her pickup and lug two Moroccan tiles out to an emptiness, blank in all directions until we fill in where we are. In the distance stand remnants of my childhood home, like a leg left from the big kitchen table I loved to hide under, and over the other way are the bits of her heart that make the Dead speak, just like a cousin of mine, and she says I have a laugh like one of hers.
iii.
in the truck we share a kiss it is brief and wonderful like a picnic on a hot day or dew on leaves of grass and momentarily the truck disappears
iv.
More bricks await in the bed, one from everywhere we haven’t been.
Still, we drive off.
We’ll have to come back soon, she says, to see whether our pavers have betrayed us and sunk into the loam.
You can never trust a paver, I say, just to say something, and she agrees.
They might lead us to ourselves, she says, but maybe they’ll lead us back to somewhere else.