First Love and the Poet

She hadn’t married the Poet. She’d married Peter instead, his fresh good looks, his blue-eyed blondness seeping underneath her skin, erasing nights spent with the dark, sad Poet in his room with the broken wall. Where is he now? She wonders sometimes, nights when the sky is streaked with pink and she is nothing but a pocket wife.

In THE POCKET WIFE, Dana thinks of her first love when she’s feeling lost or when her mental illness is beginning to kick in. Although the Poet wasn’t a beacon of stability himself, he was exactly that for Dana. Or maybe it was because he wasn’t particularly rooted in a world that was becoming increasingly confusing that he made sense to her when no one else did.  

First love is different from the others. There’s an innocence and, in Dana’s case, trust that makes the impossible nearly possible, the unreachable at our fingertips. With the Poet beside her, Dana was able to stare down her demons. Almost.

Her thoughts of the Poet involve more than missing him, this person who was once in her life. It’s a yearning for a time as well, a place, perhaps – nostalgia for the way she felt when she loved him, for the girl she was.