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Ode to the Hour Before the Party

Kai Moreno

Ode · Friendship · Hope

Praise the hour before, when nothing has gone wrong.The chairs still trust each other in their rows.The ice is winning. The playlist is a promiseno song has yet had time to break.

Praise the bowl of something, and the other bowl,and the doorbell that has not rung, and the youof an hour from now, laughing at somethingyou cannot yet imagine, with a personwho is, right now, on a train, becomingthe best part of your night without your knowing.

Praise the not-yet. Praise the still-could-be.Praise the small held breath of the tidy roombefore the beautiful ruin of the evening,the spilled, the shouted-over, the too-loud, the real.Praise the hour that only exists as almost.I have loved almost more than I have loved arrival.Praise it. Then open the door. Let it end.

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Up nextA Letter to Whoever Is Running ThisTo whoever is running this: I am not writing to complain. I want that on the record first, because everyone writes to you to complain, and you must be so tired of the mail. I am writing to say that the pomegranate is ridiculous. That you did not have to make the inside look like that. That a thing we eat could have been plain, could have been a potato, and instead it is a chandelier of small red rooms, and no one asked you to, and you did it anyway. I am writing to say I noticed. I am writing to say that if this is all there is — the pomegranate, the light on the taxis, the particular person asleep in the other room breathing like the tide coming in — then it was, on balance, worth the trouble of existing, and I withdraw, provisionally, every complaint I have not yet sent.