Josephine

It’s been ten years of Josephine,
and the world will give us decades more.
But if that’s cut short by the gods above,
I would upturn all our climbing trees,
I would dry out all our oceans,
I would leave no corner of the world unchecked searching for her.
As long as Earth is still spinning, I know for sure,
she will be there.

We’ve grown taller as we aged together,
but if we’ve always been a foot apart,
then just like coloring book circles we used to scribble in with crayons,
blue, pink, or yellow,
the circumference will still measure 360 degrees.
And just like that, nothing would really change.

But if it does, there will be nobody to pull me out of these years.
I’d sit in our playground, wondering who else would run through this mulch like you.
Who else would collect dice inside of an Altoids mint tin?
and call my phone from a thousand miles away, sitting on a New Hampshire rooftop,
to talk about cryptids hiding in the summer nights?
Would anybody impulsively color-code my closet and clear two months’ worth of a messy floor?
And most of all, somewhere in a grassy meadow
or where toads ribbit at the pond’s shore;
when the stars rain down on our last ten years,
where would I ever find another soul to sit with me at the edge of the universe?