Why is it I always find myself laying in the wet grass staring up at constellations with a set of chromosomes lighting up a cigarette that don’t belong to you?
This time the LSD flowed through the veins of a boy with blonde flowing hair. I laid next to him and tried to keep up with and envision what he saw and felt that night, and I think he could tell that I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant when he tried to describe it and he sighed with the faintest hint of frustration, but I reassured him with a simple
“talk about it.”
And he began to.
to use his hands, silhouettes against the dark violet sky, twirling and dancing, the stars twinkling and shining light between the shadowed fingers like the sun through trees. he described looking up at a circle of white light of life, and from it stemmed four hallways or paths, and then how there was a giant hand in the sky plucking at the stars, and then how the stars “danced, almost seductively, (no, seductively isn’t the right word, but it’s the easiest way to explain it)” for his eyes only. And how he was melting into the grass on our backs and the way Something by the Beatles made him feel something, and he asked about my writing and understood my anxiety and traced his tattoos in the dark, painting pictures of the ones I’d never noticed, the sparrow, the compass, the hamsa, with his words.
I felt as if I were tripping too, like the tiny tab dissolved into my own tongue for forty five minutes until it made it’s way down the back of my throat with a sip of water. Like I could feel myself melting into psychedelia with each syllable that rolled smoothly off of his tongue. Like the giant hand in the sky was mine, and I plucked the little lights like the strings of a guitar, like they burned my fingertips the way the flames from lighters did when I tested how slowly I could wave them over my fingers before I felt the heat when I was a child. Like the earth grew into me, like vines slithered their way up my spine and my vertebrae blossomed into lotus flowers, like Something by the Beatles made me feel something.
The earth was raw; it was so real.
Yet reality had never felt farther in a sober state.
I felt touched and untouchable, invincible and invisible, desired and deserted.
We finally stood and walked away from our little bed of leaves but they didn’t want me to leave- they tangled themselves in my hair and he told me to leave them in because it looked lovely.
So I did.
And I found you, where I always do.
You were laughing your acid off in the fluorescent lights of your bedroom.
And your eyes were green and your cheeks pink and your palms open and your mind
untouched by the untouched beauty we experienced and the enlightening clarity and the knowledge we sought under the all-knowing night sky.

The stars
The smoke
The silhouettes of the trees
The fog floating just above the ground
Making suburban houses on the horizon look like the pyramids in the distance
The soft snores from the now sleeping once silently staring boy laying on the grass beside me
I don't want to wake his slumber
He seems at peace and I find comfort in the outside sounds of his dreams and the crispness of the way his arm brushes the dirt when he turns and how the position of body resembles a corpse with crossed ankles and fingers draped over his chest
It's dark but I can make out the rise and fall of his breaths
It's getting cooler and the crickets chirp louder and the songs on my playlist start and end and start again
And it's so serene
It's so serene.

I wonder how long the stars captivated him before they serenaded him with twinkling lullabies
I wonder how he interpreted my silence or if he noticed it
I wonder if he's the type to notice things like that
I like to think he is.
One of those people who can lay next to you in the grass and look up at the stars and communicate the contentedness silently
I wonder if he felt it
I wonder if he heard my harmonies


I wonder how warm your bed is right now.
I wonder if you're happy you've got all that empty space to stretch your limbs like a starfish on the sheets.
I wonder if you snore.
I wonder what our pillow talk would sound like right now.
I wonder if we'd even pillow talk right now.


I wonder what time the sun rises this morning.
It must be just a few hours away.
I wonder if you're still awake.

I wonder where it goes when you're not surrounded by it.

I don't need anyone to pretend to care about my apathy.
I want to smoke cigarettes and skip meals and nights of sleep.
I want to cry to Elliott Smith and for the clouds to hide the moon because I need the darkness for a while.
The moon is shy, leave her be.
She's either shy or wants to hide.
The lunarity of my own skin shares the same feeling tonight.
I want to hide.
I want people to stop expecting me to be present, available, ready to listen
just because I have to be.
Just because I'm forced to be here.
Because I'm not being held to the earth by anything except gravity.
I don't really have to be here.
I'm choosing to be.
But gravity doesn't exist on the moon and I'm indecisive like she is;
I go through phases.
Right now, I want to be new.

The thing about inseparability is that you spend so many sleepless nights trying to familiarize yourself with each and every reason he named the arrangement of those walls "home" and when you finally leave (the candy bowl, the green Christmas lights, the keyboard, the twin size mattress, the bathroom cabinet),
Kenopsia lies in the forgotten combination code and you're left blankly staring at your front door and the splinter in your foot from the plywood floor and the unexpectedly obnoxious ding of the microwave and the look on your moms face when you have to ask which forks are in which drawer and when your cat paws at your tangled headphones but runs when you try to pet her and you remember that she is actually a he and you had to change his name because Matilda wasn't unisex enough for your niece, who's been making all A's in school, no thanks to you, even after the help you promised her was never provided, much like the bowling nights and painting mornings you once planned with her.
And you can't sleep at night because your arms aren't flexible enough to wrap themselves around your torso and rest beneath your neck like his did and your bed makes an unfamiliar screech each time you toss or turn or stretch, or blink, or take a breath and the light can't be turned off with a click of a button and the room is too cold without a radiating body next to you to fill the frigid air with warm words about running toward city lights, and you realize that you've dreamed of a home your entire life and you thought you'd never found it and maybe you still haven't but you've built a structure with his bones and use his curls as blankets,
but what the three little pigs didn't warn you of was that all it takes is a cloudy day to birth a storm strong enough to rip the ribs off their hinges.
The storm hasn't hit home yet, but it's almost hurricane season, and you can't remember where your dad always hid the flashlights from your niece; and light is shed on the fact that darkness houses vulnerability.

If you place a welcome mat outside your heart and invite me in for tea,
I'll take too long to gather my belongings
and my hands will linger on the door **** as I leave.
You'll have to wake me from the depths of my dreams because I already know I'll fall asleep,
and the infrared exit signs are the only ones I never see.
And all the while you'll be thinking of excuses, like the ones my dad used to make when the pantry was empty and so was his wallet or like the ones your dad made, the time he disappeared for months after seeing little blue balloons.
But I'll have a solution for every potential problematic goodbye
And I'll probably talk until the morning light and ignore the apathy in your eyes or the sympathy in your smile and you'll grow silent after a while and I'll question what the problem is,
but I won't see that my departure should've been the answer to this, until it was too late,
just like the time your dad disappeared for years after seeing the little blue balloons.
I'll try to lose track of time by staring at the moon.
I'll always overstay my welcome, but maybe you'll want me to stay because he didn't.

Roots rip through dirt in search of water like fire burns through pages searching for morals, the ocean screams as it evaporates and raindrops never signed up for skydiving, there is nothing gentle about a breeze shoved forward in a scream of defeat.
There is no peace in a world with anger heating its core and no dividing lines between good and bad,
the world is a grey area where everything is relative,
good and bad,
wrong and right,
illumination can be a synonym to salvation and damnation,
to a bright new beginning or the end of observation,
there is no all seeing eye that can also cast judgements,
no figment story or drug is any more important than our mysteriously unbalanced brains allow it to be and there is no other human but yourself who you will love and hate so intensely as the one who hides behind the mirror. Keep your shoulders broad when your back is weak, accepting responsibility is a much easier thing to practice than carrying each load,
people will wander in and out of your life,
some will leave footsteps or trinkets as reminders,
some will leave and never be re-minded,
selective porousness is the path to the correct tribe and the proper feeders of your flame,
let people come and go from your life as their path demands but reserve the right to deny them that right when you feel your dignity questioned.