This book, however, slightly more than just-in-case, is one of those things—pralines, David Lynch films, Stuart’s poems: the things I can’t resist that make me sick—and so I turn to the inside cover, where one of us Scotch-taped a cyanotype of dandelion tufts and our cat’s whiskers. White lines on Prussian blue twist a thorn in my heart. I flip the page, confronting haikus and triolets. An elegy. Stuart’s crusade: a return to poetic form.

I admire designs made by words on paper without yet reading the words themselves. Unlined pages tattooed with ink and tea stains, tear stains, lipstick stains like passport stamps where I’d kissed Stuart’s verse—kissed his portraits of my body, my psyche, my effect on him. His perception of my effect on the world. I stop at a page marked by a stem of pressed sea holly and feel a pang of guilt for not remembering why I marked it, not recalling any particular fondness for this sonnet at all. It must have meant something to me, though, and so I read—North of Blue Eye, due south of Marvel Cave—and hold a hand to my mouth, tracing the line of my rebel smile. For a moment, I’m twenty-eight all over again.

Stuart was an absolute nerd about my roots, fetishizing Missouri like it’s the other side of the planet, but he was from Oregon, not Osaka, and the Ozarks aren’t all that different from Myrtle Creek. Thanksgiving in Joplin with my family was cultural tourism for him—and consequently, often revelatory for me too. My parents adored Stuart. If he tended bar with a heavy hand, he could get them talking something fierce, telling stories about me, stories I’d never even heard—not that I needed to hear them all, like the one about how I was likely conceived in a Best Western in Branson while my parents were in town for a family reunion at Silver Dollar City. I could have lived without that visual.

Stuart found it romantic, though, and wanted to go there, to Silver Dollar City—“to see where the magic happened,” he joked, and I gagged—and I refused, but we did take a tour of Marvel Cave. It was as corny and beautiful as I remembered. More beautiful than corny through Stuart’s eyes. He delighted in place names: how Marble Cave was rechristened after miners failed to strike marble; how the tiny town of Blue Eye, Missouri, mirrors Blue Eye, Arkansas, across the state line. A pair of Blue Eyes hiding in the heartland. He viewed my history like it was a classic film about an average upbringing, rather than just an average upbringing, which is what it was. I liked how that felt, seeing my life his way. It was exciting. At first.