I don’t know how to start writing about you, so I thought I’d break the writer’s block by writing to you. After six nights and seven days spent within the depths of you, I left a piece of my heart behind in your waters.
It’s hard to explain to others what this is, and it’s difficult to monitor the intensity with which I speak of you. It all just made 
sense when we were together. We rose and slept with the sun. We spent our days in reverie of beauty. Within your arms, I gently died, born again on the other side with my feet on the earth. You taught me many things, but you never told me how hard it would be to communicate back this experience to those who lived outside the bounds of the world we created together.
I’m away now, and it’s not easy missing someone. You are the one with whom I desire to share the glowing details of my day-to-day because I know that you would understand what makes each so noteworthy to the eyes, the mind, the heart, the soul. But when I turn to tell you these things, I know I can’t, and even maybe that I shouldn’t.
If I showed up looking like this, if you saw me now—I wonder if you’d recognize me.
I listen to my heels click upon the concrete walkways of D.C., and I remember you. I look up at the night sky some evenings, and I can feel myself crossing the thoughts of your mind. No one can tell me that this connection wasn’t there, that it didn’t pulse through us like a calming, effortless breath—that easy silence.
But I had commitments here, and you there, and so I left you in that open ending, with that melting gaze. In the early morning hours, I came to say goodbye, but I wonder if your sleepy eyes even caught the kisses I blew your way.
I’m back here now, and I’m not ungrateful for it. There is a relationship in the city I do love; it’s just that you’ve complicated it. You muddled it with your sense of adventure, and that unique passion you evoked in my heart. My life goes on, but you haunt me. I function properly back in society, but I pine for your wildness.
I project out my city persona to the characters of my life here, but all I want to do is talk about you, and let myself become that woman who has gone mad for the Everglades. Instead, I continue to rein back the feelings, knowing full well you’ll inevitably permeate the bounds of each sentence I speak, each word I write.
And as the haze blurs then and now, somehow I know our moments will meet again.
Yours—
ROUGH OUTLINES 
Dear Everglades, It would take a lavender and pink sky melting into a pool of deep blue water to capture my daughter’s heart. She spoke of you as a child before she even smelled your salty breath, felt your ancient earth beneath her feet and seduced her little soul when she gazed up and looked at your night sky. I too know that gaze intimately when I would hold her tiny body of flesh and bones close to my beating heart and kiss every inch of her face, hands and feet with my lips memorizing every inch, every line and crease of her through my touch. She once belonged to me in the way that only daughters can understand, but the child has disappeared in the memory of those kisses and the night sky that we share now hundreds of miles a part keep her gladly lost in your arms. Still, you maybe her lover now, but sooner or later you will come to understand a woman belongs only to herself and you will find yourself waiting, as I do now, for her return.
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