IN TÖÖLÖ, HELSINKI, 2010 / DAVID DE YOUNG

After Dean Young

I said, let’s get married and you said, yes, we could live 
in your apartment in Finland, and I could get a job in IT and you 
could be a therapist, and I could bring my guitar, 
and you could organize our books by color, 
and we could have children and move to the suburbs, and I 
could go on business trips, and you could take our daughters 
to the farm, and a drug-addled woman 
could break into our home through the kitchen window 
left open by mistake and ransack our house 
for days on end because there was no one there. 

And the snow would fall in winter,
and the rains would come in spring,
and eventually, we would look at each other,
our daughters long-since moved away, 
and you would say,
Remember when the earth surged up 
and water spilled into the deep trenches of the sea
and made the continents
and broke them apart.

DAVID DE YOUNG / ESPOO, FINLAND

David de Young lost a yellow yoyo in a field in Illinois when he was seven and never recovered. And he doesn’t intend to. At 58, he’s convinced he’ll never write as well as he did when he was nineteen. When things aren’t going well, he reminds himself (and points out to others) there are no guarantees they ever will. You can find him in Finland where he lives with his wife and two daughters, or on Twitter at @daviddeyoung.