but you are worlds away

moving through mt. rainier, part two  moving through mt. rainier, part four

A possible future history of loving you: When they exhume the fossils of our memories together, the scientific community will engage in debates unseen since biopsychiatry. since the IQ test. since string theory. since the discovery of the atom.

> 2:20 AM

when i was ten we were in the desert and looking at the shined faces of petrified trees. in the world of red, here was something green. we all sat on top of a table while eating so the scorpions underneath could pass by without violence or sympathy. 

when they unbury us, when they make us immune to the grave - what unravels inside of the coffin? are your fingerprints pressed into their soft books of violet desire. am i made a monster through the shape of my jaw. did i write, as a spirit, Leave and Be Left, a cycle in candlesticks. 

> 2:30 AM

I dream about picking out soap with you. I dream about a palace where they perform careful surgeries to turn certain organs into stone. To remove what makes us weak and makes us human. I dream about you dancing under a waning moon.

i hold the desert sun as it sets between my kneecaps. the amber leaks through. 

> 2:43 AM

It never comes before we need it to, but sometimes it comes after it could have saved us. Every motto is the same motto, in my dreams. 

Ad astra per aspera. I think I knew you once before I was supposed to, maybe many times. I think you were the paper cut I got in third grade, and you were the bandaid lovingly applied. I think you were the strawberry milk I drank at the science museum cafeteria, and you were the sting of humiliation when I laughed so hard at my babysitter’s joke that it came out my nose. 

Maybe, also, you were the first bite of fine expensive steak, and the first piece of gristle I had to wincingly secret away into a napkin. Do you remember if you were the wanting? the fulfilling? The leaving? The returning?

> 3:27 AM

through hardship, to the stars 

 through the swell of tide and memory. through wanting you and never having. through the saturnine crux of our hands on soft bedsheets. i think i coveted you before i understood the term “coveting”. i think i knew you the first time i explored aching. 

 is it this, then? the swell and the forgetting? the coming and the going? the girl and her hair? the never-knowing? is it this, then? a secret in an old haunt, a fortune of no-more, a calliope of ghost song. 

>4:01 AM 

Through hardship, to the stars.

I used to think the glow behind my closed eyes was full of sunspots and kaleidoscopes. Now, the dark is full of constellations, unfinished stellar charts—Perseus your hand shyly hiding your face, Cassiopeia the shape of your body moving beneath mine, and Leo not a lion but the hook and pull of a love that should not be so easy or so hard

i dream about angler fish. i dream about a world where we all have horns. i dream about heartrates. i say - are you coming? will you come home? 

on the stoop outside our house, my friends me that they just saw a ghost. a man who looks just like one of their old friends. i spend the day wondering who i look like. once on a train a woman came up and said - can i hold your hand? you look like my niece who is no longer with us. when i touch the girl i like, it is all-new and electric; when she sleeps beside me it is somehow familiar and casual and obscene in its comfort. when i go on a walk with him, we pass people with her hair or his jawbone or my hand tremor.