I saw you last night - watched you through a window or across a room, i don't remember exactly -
You didn't see me. But you were so happy, so focused, so beautiful.
I cried, silent, watching you,
Fall in love again,
Now without me.
This is how we start to experience each other: summer highway, sweaty, teenaged, raw.
Movie lights flood cars and people gathering in a place none of us would choose to stop. On each side, guard rails, cement walls, leaves that overlap our sky like a net.
Inside this dome, this interior night, broken glass crunches under our tires. We step over it, excited. Drive over it like casualty.
Signals split us as we move through dirt road intervals, whisper secret stories across circles in dark fields lit by some stranger’s kitchen light.
The stories they make up fill their houses, told in the late-night light of these kitchens. Ours are like matches we strike in these fields, like fuel.
We shared our bedroom, its white light the last we saw before bed. She taught me how to tuck my feet into blankets so I wouldn't get snatched in the night.
Later, we would camp out on blankets on her bedroom floor, laugh at old stories, watch reruns on her black-and-white. The laughing was our door. The stories were like pictures we'd keep, later crumple and stash away in our dresser to hide.
Faint dreams fade with late-morning sun through the windows,
Another day long since begun and again without me,
And again I suffer up to sit on the edge of my bed,
And listen to the traffic in the distance and look around my room,
And ask myself, 'When will I begin?'
1) We found trails our counselors didn’t know, the mystery of abandoned rust bed frames our secret window into other: totally scary, totally real.
2) We built new letter-symbols, buried meaning like messages into hidden parts of letter shapes to fortify our language.
With each secret we traveled farther, held each other more tightly, felt more the weight of this separateness like stars on our back.
Three years old and you throw your sandwich, grape juice-soaked and jelly-filled, watch it land in the trash next to banana peels and photocopied body cut-outs.
Yellow-haired boy throws another tantrum. Now he’s on the floor: arms move unbent with each scream, fists curl like smoke, his smile half-real.
Where my jelly sandwich landed, he throws a kick—anger shoots out of his heel like fire.
I want so badly to be in his body in that moment, to feel the release of force, unharnessed, screaming.
1) The sound of water screaming envelops us as we climb.
2) Bugs live here! Not drowned by this moment’s intensity, this noise.
3) Threads of water fold into one another as they fall: this universe contains itself.
4) Our struggle past slippery rocks that build, hold force against our tread. We reach farther forward as we slip back.
Your trees stood like a curtain wall as we circled through whispering trails that took us back to your treaded arches, places others had been and marked. Our path circled further inward each time: trees’ leaves spoke softly to us and dirt rode on the backs of gently diving wind. The smell of soil in our soles that followed us on our trail meant here, now.
Rocks caught our toes, moments we lurched forward, still circling.
We didn’t quite want the safety of the trees that lined our forest, our mothers waiting back for us. Didn’t quite want to leave this circling, this thing we called lost, this green kingdom.
Lost: your trees were like castle guards as we navigated through wisping trails that took us back to your treaded arches, places others had been and marked. Trees’ leaves spoke softly to us and dirt rode on the backs of gently diving wind. The smell of soil in our soles that followed us on our trail meant here, now.
Rocks caught our toes, moments we lurched forward, still circling.
These trees always line a forest’s edge. These circles, like concentric rose petals, always move us closer, then farther away from our edge.
Undone by moments split apart, middle seams split seconds into slides like gulfs. On each side, a thought like your eye mirroring itself.
This gaze moves and I’m caught
between two choices: in the middle, you.
Trees in dark places hold fruit that never goes ripe.
Forest fingers weave overhead, form canopies that cloud thoughts from coming past.
Who comes apart here, where elbows meet this dark song?
Who holds these pieces together, grasping, like fingers for flesh?
Words you say move across bedsheets silently. This moment becomes a thought that holds me like a ball of sheets, moves me, bridge-like, into others that fit.
You said, no more room for me here.
Room is an empty vesicle I fill with things, thoughts I empty out into rooms fill me now with their silence.
This space no longer fills us. We fill up slowly with the weight of its breath.
This bridge holds you, keeps you still as you cross, hold your breath, pick your feet up for good luck. Its weight takes yours like breath. You cross through its parts not aware of the lie. Eat your little egg breakfast, balance Early Grey to songs you sing in a tone that stays confined to these walls.
This is where you go to gather stories like acorns. History stands up to you on this spot as it passes.
You’re still
Alone, still sit
at the driver’s side seat.
The sound of your voice is all that fills
you, like a house that’s filled with stories
pushing out towards its edges.
Like a flower, closing in on its scent.
