![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
voiceless fricative
Aug. 9th, 2025 11:51 am--sprung out of bed thinking about you today! Thinking about us, and how easy it has been for you to let me go. But trust me when I say, I wasn't at all hurt. What remains of what remains could break skin? polished pain haven't I already perfected, til all the sharp edges got sanded down, dumb and numb. Instead I put on the song that rung out overhead in the CD store in Washington state, as you took me round to all the counters and I stood by your side like your prom date.
I don't want to be your boyfriend, but prom date is OK. If I knew you when we were sixteen we would have rushed with Pitchforks at the Man. I would say heart, but my heart's not true : I hope you never see the kind of person I am. You talk about everyone you've ever left the same way. I hope if you kill yourself, you choose to call me first. I want to be your emergency contact or at least worth fifty cents. Is it enough to breathe in the same odd air. It was enough, your shape pressed fuzzy and irrational the root of my migraine supporting my skull. The axis of my skull. I hope it's enough to know you're out there. Sincerely, sincerely.
Enough of words I'll never say; that is, my reality out of your jurisdiction. How about something we both know? Seattle, Vancouver, Vancouver to Vancouver. A teal door like a portal to your room. The smell of your apartment was a supermarket a zebra crossing away from mine. Do you still register your dad's guitar and the TV humming from the other side of your closet? I don't think your parents very much liked China, despite the batch of fortune cookies on your kitchen island (every slip read: TRY AGAIN). Still, I liked your mom. If I could learn your language just to access her half of your dreams. (Yours are supernatural and annihilating; mine are lame, dispensed in self-reinforcing bouts of deja vu.) Unlike Past Lives, we've had little to owe the clemency of fate. You just make it so easy to keep pace. awfully busy looking behind and not beside you.
After you cried and I could not find my tears. I had my legs crossed underneath me on the mattress, and it felt so delicate... I'm vague about what I mean, but... you get "it," right? I really considered asking. Should we just kiss? Just to get it out of the way. I didn't. By then we weren't in Oakland.
I'm of the mountains, you're of the sea. And you've got land legs and that's why. I carried your bags up and down the border of the sun. I leaned against the fountain smoking a cigarette--men coming off their lunch breaks nodded at me with totally foreign grins. You, docked and anchored in wait. So adult.
Between the two of us we imagined white minivans and you'd be a great father. We'd get married for the tax benefits. At 30, I'll remember, should you still feel the same. We could elope somewhere not-Seattle, with sturdier eaves. You were embarrassed by Vancouver--tall and metallic and somehow green. Would we move back to California? Or Philadelphia. You know? The city of brotherly love.
Music retrieves us, dance debilitates us, fiction chases us away. Like that? I tried my hand at someone else. I read this book lately, Suicide. Yeah, that was the name. Edouard... something. I put on the same song he walked in on his friend listening to (to overhear is perverse). In the Court of the Crimson King -- I talk to the wind. But when I listen to music I give it my all. I mean, so then I didn't read.
I went on a stroll. I went for a smoke. Said a tinned voice on my phone Let's go to the northern part of the country and travel to other cities. Metal glows at night. Taking for granted
A teal door:
North, Vancouver. was the first time you got high. far from mine. And hardly my favorite way to change my mind, but everyone starts with edibles: like, man. I was sixteen in a basement and a girl threw up holding the mini-fridge as a suitcase the whole night. I was shaking out of my fucking skin but my best friend was worse. Kept begging me to tell her that everything was gonna be okay. I did, OK OK OK until I was just making my mouth make the shape, oh and the hissing air from the middle lane of my tongue. We had a better time, didn't we? You slept over on my mattress. We listened to music separately, simultaneously; disbelieving that the song was ever gonna end. Endless quick and dirty, shattering of hi-hats, sheets of sound like thin panes of rain, crashing. In the eye of the storm.
I only felt this way twice in my life. Once, Midwest jazz put me in a trance. And, May of this year, I had taken shrooms and gas station candy together in the bathroom of the concert. Peaking, peaked, passed out. When we're not together, my chest is under less strain. Sometimes you frustrate me so much I can't breathe. But it's so much more boring... so without language. Come back soon, won't you? I may seem callous, but you know, you're the only person I can look in the eyes and say I love.
I don't want to be your boyfriend, but prom date is OK. If I knew you when we were sixteen we would have rushed with Pitchforks at the Man. I would say heart, but my heart's not true : I hope you never see the kind of person I am. You talk about everyone you've ever left the same way. I hope if you kill yourself, you choose to call me first. I want to be your emergency contact or at least worth fifty cents. Is it enough to breathe in the same odd air. It was enough, your shape pressed fuzzy and irrational the root of my migraine supporting my skull. The axis of my skull. I hope it's enough to know you're out there. Sincerely, sincerely.
Enough of words I'll never say; that is, my reality out of your jurisdiction. How about something we both know? Seattle, Vancouver, Vancouver to Vancouver. A teal door like a portal to your room. The smell of your apartment was a supermarket a zebra crossing away from mine. Do you still register your dad's guitar and the TV humming from the other side of your closet? I don't think your parents very much liked China, despite the batch of fortune cookies on your kitchen island (every slip read: TRY AGAIN). Still, I liked your mom. If I could learn your language just to access her half of your dreams. (Yours are supernatural and annihilating; mine are lame, dispensed in self-reinforcing bouts of deja vu.) Unlike Past Lives, we've had little to owe the clemency of fate. You just make it so easy to keep pace. awfully busy looking behind and not beside you.
After you cried and I could not find my tears. I had my legs crossed underneath me on the mattress, and it felt so delicate... I'm vague about what I mean, but... you get "it," right? I really considered asking. Should we just kiss? Just to get it out of the way. I didn't. By then we weren't in Oakland.
I'm of the mountains, you're of the sea. And you've got land legs and that's why. I carried your bags up and down the border of the sun. I leaned against the fountain smoking a cigarette--men coming off their lunch breaks nodded at me with totally foreign grins. You, docked and anchored in wait. So adult.
Between the two of us we imagined white minivans and you'd be a great father. We'd get married for the tax benefits. At 30, I'll remember, should you still feel the same. We could elope somewhere not-Seattle, with sturdier eaves. You were embarrassed by Vancouver--tall and metallic and somehow green. Would we move back to California? Or Philadelphia. You know? The city of brotherly love.
Music retrieves us, dance debilitates us, fiction chases us away. Like that? I tried my hand at someone else. I read this book lately, Suicide. Yeah, that was the name. Edouard... something. I put on the same song he walked in on his friend listening to (to overhear is perverse). In the Court of the Crimson King -- I talk to the wind. But when I listen to music I give it my all. I mean, so then I didn't read.
I went on a stroll. I went for a smoke. Said a tinned voice on my phone Let's go to the northern part of the country and travel to other cities. Metal glows at night. Taking for granted
A teal door:
North, Vancouver. was the first time you got high. far from mine. And hardly my favorite way to change my mind, but everyone starts with edibles: like, man. I was sixteen in a basement and a girl threw up holding the mini-fridge as a suitcase the whole night. I was shaking out of my fucking skin but my best friend was worse. Kept begging me to tell her that everything was gonna be okay. I did, OK OK OK until I was just making my mouth make the shape, oh and the hissing air from the middle lane of my tongue. We had a better time, didn't we? You slept over on my mattress. We listened to music separately, simultaneously; disbelieving that the song was ever gonna end. Endless quick and dirty, shattering of hi-hats, sheets of sound like thin panes of rain, crashing. In the eye of the storm.
I only felt this way twice in my life. Once, Midwest jazz put me in a trance. And, May of this year, I had taken shrooms and gas station candy together in the bathroom of the concert. Peaking, peaked, passed out. When we're not together, my chest is under less strain. Sometimes you frustrate me so much I can't breathe. But it's so much more boring... so without language. Come back soon, won't you? I may seem callous, but you know, you're the only person I can look in the eyes and say I love.
