If Wishes Were Horses

Words by Matthew Goldberg

Don’t you wish you could feel Mom’s hand rubbing your back as you fall asleep? For that one small thing you only sometimes remember—the comfort of your warm, saliva-pruned thumb, getting swooped up onto Dad’s shoulders, cut grass on your cheek in the spring? Back when you could watch the sun sink beneath those full-grown maples on your front lawn, at your first house, the house where you grew up before the divorce?

Don’t you wish you could come home and the house would be neither silent nor loud, eventoned, full of familial love? For that first day of school even if it’s just going from the smaller one to the bigger one where they sell French fries for lunch and you have the illusion of choice? Back when you could sit in the stands, knees pressed up against someone and hoping this was an intentional pressing, that it will lead somewhere and your daily dreams will become reality, your fears banished, your peers humbled, your greatest ambition achieved?

Don’t you wish you could go back to campus, but not as it is, but as it was, frozen in that time where your future was boundless and opportunity spilled wantonly? To remember just one thing you studied, just one fact that stayed with you? Don’t you wish you made a more lucrative choice for your future? To be a prodigy, where rising up wasn’t so hard, where shots on goal would lead to scores? Don’t you wish you could feel like you won something for once?

Don’t you wish for her? Walking by the river with her, your ungloved hands icy, loose stones crunching underfoot? Or having someone near you, loving you, holding you when you got the news about Dad—the mid-afternoon phone call? Don’t you wish for the house, the decorating, the redecorating, the re-redecorating, the steady passing of years? For the friends, the parties, the deepening of bonds, the sharing of drugs, and experiences near and far?

Don’t you wish for the crawl of the bus through the mountains and the arrival, the vistas, the snow white sheep, the tanned men staring wearily but accepting the dollars of sightseers? Or the warm breeze at night on the marsh as the saltgrass and cattails swayed, hiding the croaks of frogs or toads—a distinction only she knew? Don’t you wish for her? Don’t you?

Don’t you wish you were sinking, sinking into your memories, staying submerged not having to awake into your life? That you could take a deep, full breath, vital and elastic? Don’t you wish, as you lay there, for your family? You wish for them to do all the things you could and could not do. You wish everything for them: do everything, be everything. Don’t you wish that whatever comes next is not an end, but a richness like nothing you could have ever guessed?