against all real evidence things have feelings, too. they don’t love in the human way, still:
my thrift shop sweater, faded red and out at the elbows, has a story. I try to imagine the places it has been and who wore it before it was mine.
the torn-up Adidas are retired now but they still trash-talk to me from the back of my closet. I stare at them and remember every swoosh, all the layups we missed, and the wrong turns we took together.
the tattered photographs of abuelo y abuela I keep in my guitar case whisper to each other. I think they disapprove of how I style my hair these days.
and my used poetry books think softly to themselves in between readings, and the whittled-down pencil on the kitchen table dreams under its yellow blanket of what we may write together the next time.
these will always be more than just things to me. we’re connected for life. I have become all these things. and they have become a part of my inheritance: these sometimes forgotten things I thought I was done with forever take my back in their arms.
the other afternoon at the memory center where I go to sing this beautiful 81-year-old lady named Carolina told me she felt unwanted and forgotten. I didn’t know what to say.
I asked if I could play her a song, and out of my head fell PJ Harvey, Who Will Love Me Now. couldn’t keep it together at the end, Carolina’s eyes were too much.
cookie nieves 
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