Heaven is what it is, but there are grass clippings stuck to the bottom of my feet, and you are dripping sweat from your chin and elbows bent over my always-broken lawnmower, and the neighbor is staring because he can't make heads or tails of either of our bodies together or separately, and I am not supposed to be in love with you.

Yesterday god spoke to me in a voice like Kool-Aid; threw a leg over my bedroom windowsill — a teen in some 90's sitcom — and said: "Look this is how it is kid." And I tried to tell him I'm not a kid, which he should have seen given I was picking an ingrown hair from the crease of my thigh to avoid doing taxes. He offered me a deal: to love anyone but you.

On my way to the shoe cavern where I work, I am allowed to fall in love with the girl at the coffee shop who asks me what kind of milk I want with a sexy catch in her voice and has, to my knowledge, broken twenty-seven hearts. On every other Friday of the month, I am allowed to be in love with my best friend's husband who looks like 90s Colin Firth and always buys my favorite beer. On my birthday and special occasions, I am allowed to fall in love with anyone who will never leave me and never know me and always, always wish I were half myself: one thing or the other.

God says that happiness is complicated and bad for business. He first came to me on the pullup bars at the park where I was hanging from eight-year-old kneecaps that still worked without popping. He said: "find something safe that you can hold or never try to hold anything — that's how you get heaven and all the kingdoms of the world." And I told him I didn't like safe, and he said, "tough cookies kid, do you want heaven and the kingdoms of the world or not?" And because I was a kid, I said "ok, yes, obviously right," and for years only fell into appropriate love with codifiable persons. 

But I would like to lick the sweat dripping off your chin, peel the sports bra off your body and say fuck the lawnmower because I have broken it a hundred times to lure your uncertain body to my yard. I want to walk squinting into this brutal August sunset with you, and when you ask, "how do you even find the sunset" I will tell you to turn your back on all the kingdoms of the world and walk due south. I will tell you to hold on to me because both love and the setting sun are blinding and if I'm honest, we'll probably lose each other anyway. Because I am not supposed to be in love with you and heaven still, still is what it is.


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