Rene's gonna be so impressed.

Revised art by Hiroyuki-Mitsume Takahashi

You look like who you’ll be at sixty-five.

This is rare; you are rare, you are a present loosely wrapped in a rumpled blue oxford and, for twine, a caramel braided belt barely associating with your slim hips. The newspaper folded under your arm, the cup of deli coffee long gone cold in your hand, the glasses inching the length of your nose, the book cracked open in your lap – you hunch over it all like a surgeon, or an appraiser of jewelry. It hasn’t occurred to you to be handsome, and because of this you are, very.

You are your sole inhabitant, and the light on inside of you is the one that you read by. I want to spend my life competing for your attention with books. When I woke up this morning, at 1:30pm, there was a gentleman being interviewed on the radio about his book, a book about climate change and the near future. He said strange little things will begin to change, things we’d never even think of: he said in fifty years it will be so hot that the business suit will go extinct. It frightened me. I am easily frightened these days. I want to go to a planetarium with you, imagine planets we’d treat better than we did ours. I want to ride out our days in quiet car after quiet car, our silence not a cold threat but a screen porch. Our silence not a cold threat but warm like the sun coming in through the train window, feeding not the garden we tend together, for there is no garden we tend together, there are only the gardens we each must tend on our own – which is solitary and hard – but every now and then how wonderful, at the end of the day, to turn to the other and say, aren’t I coming along nicely,  and look how you’re coming in, and we’ll see what’s ready to be picked and together, try and have a meal.

s h e l t e r .