I was sorry when the giggling girls
in aggressive costumes
arrived without presents and
held court in the center of your
clean-smelling carpet; sorry
when they pushed and shoved to
"The Theme from Harry Potter,” and sorry
again when the music stopped and you
were banished to a corner
to remove your vampire fangs
and be hit in the head by a
carelessly tossed clown wig
(it wasn’t your actual birthday
anyway, they said).

And I was glad when
those girls all left, clutching
party-favors of candy corn
and dinosaur washcloths; whisked off
in their spotless minivans as up and down
your street the artificial glow
of the street lamps switched on like
premature Christmas lights.

I was gladder still when, later,
alone upstairs, you and I peeled off our
attempts at fitting in, unmasking
ourselves into the gap-toothed
third graders we were
in your parents'
bathroom. You looked so young
in your Tinker-bell nightgown (identical
to your first-grade sister’s): so young
I could hardly believe I was young
as well.  We stood side by side
in the marble-lined mirror as you
graced my toothbrush with a dollop
of strawberry paste (I disliked
it, though I liked that we
had shared something).

And when later still, after we’d
been put to bed, we
turned on the  light to play with our
Groovy Girls (with hushed voices, so your
mother wouldn’t hear) and then
slid down the slippery banister to find your
father whistling along to the “Monster Mash”
as his vacuum cleaner sucked up the
mess that those girls had left,
and we were hypnotized
by the sight of a single
orange balloon clinging
to the ceiling -- we shared something
then, as well.

So when your mother at last
caught us up and pressed us
back into unkind beds with
lotioned hands, and we were
enveloped by the humid
darkness of your room, I
thought wistfully about how
different Night feels when
you aren’t alone in it
and I believed that closeness
between us would be something
we’d feel consistently,
more than just a circumstantial
opportunity (like the power
of those girls so contentedly,
blindly, in control
at your party).

And even though in the six years since then
they’ve closed your gap-toothed smile
with Invisalign braces
and your face now wears
a permanent mask of Cheerful and Complete
and you have learned
a thousand ways to shut me out

sometimes I think
that if I can only find
the right words to say
we can find our way back
to that room, where the Groovy
Girls will still lie
strewn across the floor
for us to pick up
in the morning, and our beds will
be waiting for us side by side,
open and warm, while overhead
a single orange balloon
will still cling
to the ceiling.