I'm not good at closing doors quietly.
So much so that my father made a sign to remind me.
It says:  

Shh!
Quiet Please!

in blue magic marker.
It's not that he's trying to stifle me, he's just sleeping.

My mother told me that she had to realign the door frames after I moved out, as they had grown used to my proclivity for slamming.

It is the waiting which
makes people so vaguely uncomfortable.
So much so that
I think we all start to pretend
(as hard as we can)
that we are the only ones.

Or perhaps not the waiting.
But the lack of control it conveys
ushered in like a grey balloon  swathed in ugly red wool
and there is nothing I can do except to stare at the ceiling paint
peeling faintly slowly carelessly
to wherever old ceiling paint goes

Because after this layer there is another:
white like bones.
Next is red like candy,
then green like plastic trees,
until after ten inches of blue
you reach stone-cold metal, so ancient and unused to the air
that it might crumble if you sneezed too enthusiastically.

I have shaken you off
like his cold from Thanksgiving
or like summer skin
freckled with "you look beautiful!"s and my weight on your shoulders
among green sheets and purple walls

In a hardware store we felt like a bad couple
such sad and discordant energy among
steel hammers and that perfect bracket
that I couldn't find.

so many shades of home
exist simultaneously in this city

and i feel so lucky to call this corner mine for now.

i'm sure someday i'll be hidden away in the mountains again
or surrounded by thousands of trees so much taller than i

but for now the lights on train are exciting enough.

and inexplicably we jump
into the lake
though it is three in the morning and cold

i feel a young man's giggle on my neck
and turn to find buck teeth
odd-angled
too-broad shoulders for such a giggle

next to him the fog rolls off the water
and covers my chin like it covers the rocks
so i can barely see them
and she trips, tumbling, like she's a step away from an avalanche

pine trees reach up to the moon and down the water
and our laughter
meets in the middle.

"i'm sorry that i sort of fell apart after you left."

i tell him that it's okay, that we all have bad days, and that the delivery can be made tomorrow. i thought i'd made it clear hundreds of times that i am usually the one to fall apart, to scream in the woods, and to sit blankly on the bus until i am home.

i consume black coffee by the steaming mouthful
so i can stay awake long enough to do something useful
i am playing a waiting game with my feelings
but i have never been acquainted with patience
the way i admire so much in the humans who love me best

maybe all we all require is the opposite of what we are
to fill in the space between your fingers
is exactly what you can’t hold onto.

anyway i miss your mouth.

"6 years old, brunette hair, pink dress."
"I’m with the grandmother."
"Last seen?"

Later they found her by the moon star wall.
It sang her arrival to hold a stranger’s hand and, grinning, she skipped to her grandmother’s arms.

I remember my primary school
which was all large hallways and shiny shoes

library
which was all popsicle stick projects
and a round reading room

after hours and finding a book about art.

I showed it to Mrs Romano
who was fat in a pleasant way and wore round glasses

and she said “Picasso?”
and
i said
"yes."

he says don’t get too comfortable
i say it is not in my nature to do so

this is a man who stood on the edge of the mountain to make me laugh
and moved across the country three weeks later

he invited me in to see his stained glass window
but i had work in the morning and anyway his hands felt like

the roots that grow out of potatoes that you leave too long in the cabinet
knobby and altogether alien, uncomfortable and unyielding.

he plays with light and i have nothing to do with it
no emotion compared to Popsicle Boy or to the ever-logical Elbows.
(i thought i should bring him up because i love him)
but he let go on the day that I was concerned with the pottery wheel
and it was graceful and unimportant at the time

now its all a wash
and i miss the clay hidden behind my knees on the days we’d climb up to mountain for ice cream and giggling.

crooked teeth houses push
"i love yous" to the front porch of my mouth
in an earnest attempt to
set the sun down to a slower tempo
hoping if i can hold onto this city
on the day we almost crashed
then i maybe i’ll be able to hold onto him

i can’t kick the words past my lips so i
try to keep holding his hand
even though he needs to shift gears

he tells me that he likes it when i kiss him on the mouth
i like it when he’s cursing under his breath because things are so beautiful
i want to see him naked every single day

he told me when he shaved his face
and even though i already knew about it
when i saw it in person i squealed
and i couldn’t stop kissing his jawline
even though we were in public
and even though i’m pretty sure i tasted like macaroni

it’s the razor's edge of winter
and kissing you smells like mustache wax.

you drive me to the hardware store to pick up galvanized wire
so that i can build miniature shadow people
that make us laugh for hours

it’s hard to find the soft parts of you to rest my head on
but it’s always the simple parts that i like best

my anemic blood the color of saffron
is running out of my back
and into the bathwater

my sister is screaming
quarter past a freckle
and she jumps out

the metal faucet where the water
pours out in gallons
is sharper than I thought it was.

It was cold and I was tired
so I fell asleep
with the taste of Sunday still in my mouth

Because I have fallen in love with men like shadows, I have learned what it means to hold onto my light.

You do not have to remember the day you recognized your own autonomy on the same day you continue to define your freedom.

Take it easy.

Letting go of a round shouldered man who wanted to change my signature means touching the slimy parts of my bloodstream ink jar heart.

It means peeling back the window shade to smash the glass pane eyeteeth of my youth.

And remembering the key to unhinge my jaw tension voice sans stones and lacking sweetness.

It means saying goodbye today and releasing my ribcage parakeet hands to catch my own thoughts.

I am through with placeholding promises and biting through backwoods in order to forget the pieces of strength that I love so much.

I am told that my anatomy is the sheer academy of my lack of sensibility and that my sense of autonomy is just my way of rebelling against my own skin.

Because I was born in a body that is just a little too small to contain such an opinion, and so this must be just the remainder of some book I read, right?

I am told that at times my mouth traces outlines larger than my hands can, and all I know is that my fingers stretch to try and reach the cord that turns off the light on my porch so that I can find the streetlight shadow puppet.

Because I am at odds with the lightbulb delivery of my best friend’s idealism and my body’s realism and it’s all a sense of alchemism when I’m searching for altruism.

I’m told that I am too big for my body, or “for such a little girl, you’re very smart,”. I used to start in the plus-size section of stores, only to be escorted to diminutive floral prints and capri pants.

I am still mistaken for a lost child at the airport, I am still advised not to go out in certain areas after dark, I didn’t realize I was small until I wasn’t listened to.

date a boy who owns a sewing machine
and takes you to feminist modern art exhibits

date the son of a librarian
who can tell you all your favorite stories
while you fall asleep

date a boy who wears a chalkboard helmet
to ride a motorcycle to the top of the mountain
to see the city lights

date a boy who follows you up mountains
to kiss you in the wind
and run his hands through your hair

and date a boy with glasses
who pushes them up on the bridge of his nose
after he kisses you

your voice still sounds like flowers
but now your hands feel familiar

I’m glad you wear a helmet when you ride your motorcycle because your brain is far too pretty to be splattered on wet pavement

I’m glad you take care of the humans in your life because your son is a genius trapped behind his own shaky hands

I’m glad you’re honest with yourself because your teeth hold so much truth that your tongue still astounds me

I’m glad you always ask how I’m doing because it helps me to remember to ask myself.

Strangers are nice to me because I’m pretty, but I wouldn’t be much without the rest of you.

I think we’re all just honest missing pieces

shoved under the couch or chewed past recognition

we fill these flaw with tact and with sarcasm

with extremes and shouts and prayers

and kisses and each other

i have plenty of dried leaves and hot water at home, but my winter self hikes four miles in the snow for a cup of tea.
i know more words than i had ever hoped to understand, but i still shuffle them like tap shoes to place meaning on my notebooks.
i have seen mountain views that make me weak in the knees, but i still need to see what else the world holds, and if that makes me reckless beyond being someone’s wife, then so be it.
I understand that the life that I want is not one that should be kept up with or stood alongside, but one where I deign mystery into my own flesh and mysticism into my own sky

You tip my femininity when you scratch my back with your stubble before you shave in the mornings and it is so lovely to be near one who can cry.

You wear heavy boots with the tip of the steel toe showing to match the glint of mischief bouncing off your eyeglass frames and i stand on your toes to kiss you goodnight on my porch in the snow where you brought me oatmeal cookies to talk with you about foundations.

I don’t know if you needed help with that paper, but I certainly needed the cookies.

long fingers crooked with the holding

of the words of dead men and motorcycle handles

called me brave instead of pretty

and my whole heart took

courage by the throat and kissed it madly.

Full sta(r)ring
I sit as the window
was a pleading enormous nobody
he declared my head
practically lost.

2.
flustered you’ll doubt that
he glanced
sleep can’t.

3.
Crooked conversation listeners
clenched authority grimy
beside the sight attempt

4.
that chanced amusement
obliged its stiff attempt
by askance explanation
he and the slipped tongue
therefore sitting
on the heels of friday

5.
overhead the engine slipped suddenly when
she whispers explanation
grand

6.
growling hurried difficulty
shouldn’t reason but
the creature bitterly
declared in smaller steps
"you’ll doubt when i"

7.
I blinked and riddle
the shifting moral of executed
fright the cunning
underpromised
dependent muddle
congressional huddle

8.
not the sadistic wet world
glaring or the the the
defended
answers soaped the the the
dyed course
hello doesn’t the the the
let my coming

9.
adding highest denial
we tear the despair
rolling secret sea so far
winter guard softly introduced
my remembered underneath

10.
his daughter
a canary warily dared
to pretend to drink in
bound education of judging

11.
the height dating
and pushy she interrupting
like the party
for wonderful
      couple of sharks

12.
elbow listening did dishes
she declared panicky
we will go by asking
uh um
curled hair blank slate
forming saucepan all sobbing

Artichokes will always make me think

of you drunk in Vermont on your 22nd birthday.

Giggling and tired from the rocks of the mountains

you spilled both our drinks and wrung your hands

in complete defiance of giving a ****.

black coffee is curly soft hair on my cheeks
wool in my lungs is the Negev Desert
and thursdays smell like mint

i walked out of my house

half past midnight

in a short skirt and torn tights but

i was not headed for disaster.

i was on my way to sit in a circle

and dance in a triangle

and sleep

on a square.

Your voice is like flowers
Your voice is like Thursdays
Your voice is all the best kinds of ice cream
Oh please stay

Tell me more about that story
Tell me more about that day
Tell me how you thought you’d run
And how you ever convinced yourself to stay

You make my heart flip flop
when you open the door
when it’s cold and I’m waiting
outside on your porch
and you say always “hey”

When you first thought
that this might hurt
you went indoors
washed your hands of the dirt
just like we planned

As you reach a mountain’s peak, your weight slightly decreases as you get further and further away from the Earth’s core and gravity loosens its hold ever so slightly. If you have ever felt this tiny change in more than a physical sense, then this is for you.

This is for train tracks and box cars, this is for every road we planned to trip but never departed, this is for the difference between August and October and the first snowflake on my sister’s freckles a whole week before Halloween.

Because nothing is as sturdy as uncertainty. Nothing is more constant than the ever changing blues right before dusk in the summertime, where the deepest blue is just over your head. It’s the untruth of the moving target and the integrity of the unlocked window and driving through mountains during a snowstorm on Christmas morning to be home in time for my brother’s favorite joke, but I take the turn too quickly and spin my mother’s car into the woods.

Because I can only trust something viscous and permeable, and there’s this moment when you first see someone push their hair out of their eyes, or take off their glasses that is so identifiably human that I can’t get it out of my head.

The arrangement of my mother’s garden isn’t one I remember because I want to. I remember it because it held her hands when I couldn’t and the hockey game on the car radio wasn’t important because my father said it was a playoff game, but because it was a place we could exchange our thin ice for someone else’s.

This paralysis of analysis lives in the heart of transitional phrases.

I like when we are alone together.
I like to be alone with you.
I like to be safe and adventuring at the same time, when my head meets the mountain and my feet meet the rock.

my moonbeam mountain boots fell apart the moment I left home, but I picked up my blueberry pail and I took to the fields like I always do.

He picked up your knife and he stabbed a man in the stomach of his heart, where he kept his daughter’s pocket mouse nomenclature. He kept the cells in a jar next to his collection of Roald Dahl stories.

Probably. Maybe not.

I like when I can sleep in your bed and feel absolutely balanced. You tip my femininity when you scratch my back with your stubble before you shave in the mornings and it is so lovely to be near one who can cry.

I miss taking the train in the mornings and the subways in the evenings when I spent last summer  in Philadelphia more than I miss you.

I’m more confused in a way that forgives myself and I’m more creative in the work that i do. I’m more honest in all aspects and more understanding in my suspects.

You ran the maze past sanity and doubt
as if
your skies with the stone rock

could speak past a whisper.

I hid in perfume bottles notes to my old self
and I buried the harbinger dolls.

quiet boy stepped into my looking glass and handed me his helmet
years past until i noticed his long graceful hands in my hair
and i turned to see where he had come from

it was just past nine when i took the zucchini out of the oven and waited
it was half past ten by the time he rang the bell
and i sat nervous and shallow

he gets lost in his own world and finds his hands in mine
we stepped back from our maps and abandoned our ships
i sank in with the anchors

it was just last night when i realized i could love you
it was three junes since i first wanted to
i kissed you in the nighttime.

the shadow of summer haunted her like an inconsiderate ghost, but we had been sad since last tuesdays and it didn’t matter anymore.

it felt like a bouquet of “just fine, thanks” and burned fingertips and concentrated annotations of ethical etiquette, so we sat in our rooms and held onto our own hands until the buckets passed and we could all puddle-skip past the broken bicycles.

I love roller coasters.
I love the old rickety ones that jar my spine and push me into my little sister and i can feel our ribcages collide with the
click-click-click as they slowly build suspense and propel me towards the sun.

my last boyfriend hated them. He felt that his stomach couldn’t stand up to the drop of gravity so he ran at the sight of the climb up to reason and fled the line when i unbuckled my seatbelt.

i love waiting in line for a **** good thrill, and i count down the minutes until the spill of my scream echoes into the hairspray of the woman in front of me as she holds the hand of her cut-offs husband.

i guess you aren’t one to pine for the wooden tracks of thrill, either. but last night i lay in bed, on my side, trying to memorize the planes of your face, trying to calculate the angle of your nose as it leans slightly to your right, you tell me it’s crooked, i tell you it is lovely. it is the finest architecture this side of eiffel tower and you run your hands from the top of my collarbone, down the valley of my waist to the top of my hip, and you tell me you wish you had a tiny car to run along the line.

most of all i love the fall.

the cab drivers always look hopeful
and the bicyclists always seem scared
but it feels like my ribcage birdhouse could stay

it’s my version of home that lives in my chest
past the honor of winters plaid sleeves and silver glasses
it’s room for just me and my clothespin wrists fold up to fit inside
and my braids tickle my nose while i’m there

i can get anywhere from there
and it’s exactly where i always return

there’s a dinosaur on the corner of my favorite place
and all his friends remind me to stay happy
as they stand by and good bye the places i need to go


and i walk up the thousand and six stairs to the top
more alone than i wanted to be
and i am quiet
and i listened but that was the day that the city shut up

and i’m always looking for motorcycles out of the corner of my eye because you pause conversation to watch them fly by
and i know for a moment there your head gets lost

just exactly where you like it


or at least i think you like it

his sheets felt like the ocean on my skin
so i forced his head head under the surface
while i counted his eyelashes.

his hands looked like paper lace
so i grabbed his fingers tighter
and brought them to my lips.

his shoulders smell like the floor of a forest of pine trees
so i laid my head on his chest
roped my fingers through his hair
while the lights flickered in his basement

i wonder who let him hold the keys to his own chest
or the cradle for his own mind
his structure of patience is beyond architecture
and his touch of my spine is beyond medicine

I couldn’t stop crying when you played guitar on your birthday on my parents porch because it was time you chose to spend with me out of anyone in the entire world and it’s so rare that anyone ever gets to be exactly where they want to be.

He asks me to choke him about fifteen times a day. Fourteen times, I do, but the fifteenth, I take his throat in my hands and I kiss him everywhere he used to hurt. Somewhere along the way I lost track of what it meant to hurt. I tip toe tightrope walk across the tiniest line between good pain and bad pain and I am wearing the daintiest dress you’ve ever seen.

I wonder if a younger version of myself, even a year younger, could look me in the eyes and tell me what they thought they were doing this whole time. I wonder if I could hand that version of myself a sliver of a clock, a grain of sand from an hourglass, a tick of a kitchen timer so that she could have something to stand on, from a step stool perspective of what this year would bring.

When he grabs my wrist and pins me to the sheets like a butterfly, he uses his eyelashes to tickle my cheeks.

When he looks at me and my stomach drops, I tell him he’s handsome and he tells me he needs a haircut.

I knew when your skin stopped smelling like oak trees that it was time for me to leave you. I knew when everything tasted like curry and *** that I needed to run, but I wasn’t ready for months.

So I spent months. I spent almost a full year convincing myself I was in love, wrapped in plaid blankets and handmade ugly red scarves and even uglier red scars and I was just running through the motions until I gained momentum.

At the time, I taught art, and I’d come home from work with big, rainbow spills on my skin. Green on my arms, blue on my knees, red on my chin, and you looked at me and said
"Don’t they have a sink where you work?"

I guess I knew then too.

We got drunk before my bus left and I knew then.

I kept giving you pieces of me to hold onto. I’d hand you my thumbnail’s song on a mandolin, I’d give you my long hair to braid, I’d give you my toes to **** on and you carried it all down with you. I’m sorry for that.

The museum feels like heaven, feels like I could walk into the corner Pollack and the indiscriminate Monet, but there’s the characterization of Thomas Kane and you hate Mondays security guard.

The man with a beard followed me all the way from the Impressionist room to the modern films and when he finally made me lift my eyes from the canvas, his were turquoise and shook me awake.

I kept running up the stairs because I finally found out where they keep the hidden garden with the spiraled copper fountain and I laughed when I found my reflection in the Italian enamel.

You fell asleep with your head on my knees.
The weight of your skull was alarmingly heavy, so I played with your hair until you woke up. The moment of recognition on your face was so human I wanted to cry.

You scrunch up your eyebrows and touch your glasses trying to remember and a tiny echo of a perfect smile plays on your lips. You kiss me exactly and hum along.

You carried a contraband white umbrella into the gallery so we hid it under a desk. Your helmet was still blank so I gave you some concept art. Your languid loss of service as a multitude of goodbyes allow me to kiss your forehead right as your thoughts hit the pillow.


So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I understand why you tuck me into a warmer blanket before you leave for work in the morning with your heavy boots and your thermos and let me sleep while you shower and kiss me awake for breakfast with a cup of coffee in hand.

I smell like the zucchini bread that I spent all afternoon baking.
You smell like pine wood and soap.
She smells like lavender and lipstick,
He smells like rosemary and hope.

We all bike down the valley to get to the spring,
helmets on, eyes to the horizon,
the skyline, I swear, rose to meet us that day.

You and I get there first, we lay in the sun
by the river, dancing on the stones,
jumping off ledges in boots
til the wind chills our bones.

We warm up with blankets,
unpack our baskets
and settle in for the sunset over the river.

Illuminate the bridges,
halflight the buildings,
shine on the rivers,
the light stopped lilting.

Brilliant colors, then none at all.
It grew darker again and we said goodnight.
"Do you mind if we don’t go straight home?"

Not at all, not at all, not at all.

My nutritionist told me I need to increase my caloric intake and eat more carbs. I asked my nutritionist, “aren’t carbs bad for you?”
She said, “No. Carbs are not bad for you, carbs are an immediate energy source for your body to use, what’s bad for you is not eating enough and passing out at the end of the day like some ***** *****. Now eat some carbs and get some meat on those bones before I order you a ******* pizza myself.”

I should mention that my nutritionist is also my best friend. I call her Lady Reptar, because she is one. A lady, not a reptar, even though she’s twenty times more awesome than a dinosaur and fifty times nicer. She’s beautiful like a ******* daisy in the woods and she’s sharp and wittier than her cooking knives and she’s warmer than her father’s woodstove.

"So, do poppy seeds count as protein?"

I want my heart to feel like the great Salt Lakes, reaching towards each other, constantly suspended in the moment just before contact. I want to build this anticipation, but my patience is shorter than your last haircut, when we sat by the river to discuss model trains.

I want my mind to feel like a hummingbird when it finally lands to rest on the red plastic device filled with sugar water outside my mother’s kitchen window, but I’m quite a ways from home now and have been for a while.

I want my stomach to feel like the tree roots, the red oaks, the ones that dwarf me and that I know would let me get my favorite kind of lost in their home, the kind we planned on visiting after graduation, but I am usually stuck in maple sap.

I want my mouth to taste like strawberries, ripened scarlet in the sun, the kind my tall friend’s mother mashes up with sour rhubarb for the perfect jam to last us through winter, but more often than not, my teeth are coffee-stained and my tongue tends to be too sharp for delicate berries.

I want my skin to feel like satin ribbons, the kind that tie little girl sashes before holy events and parties where they dance on their father’s toes for the first time, and find it perfectly marvelous, but I am covered in scratches and marks from building enormities.

I am a patchwork from the most meaningless scraps. I was a junkyard doll with mismatch buttons eyes and melted cardboard shoes. My head is a garbage heap left out too long, my eyes are scooping all of it up, and my dress is made of someone else’s throwaway linen.  My aluminum can hands stretch out for anyone’s how-town while I think of shoestring revues and paper mache.

If today was for giant caterpillars,
giant crowds,
giant sounds,
and chaos, then this evening must be for

Blueberry fingertips
white wine in my glass
the music of an accordion
and a paperback novel.

Breeze in the window that waltzes with ribbons
and fills the bottles I’ve collected for the past six years.

(soft t shirt from the first time I fell asleep on his couch)

mmm, stop WORRYING.
It is no time at all for any of that.
Take the time to take the time to take your time.
shhh, brain.
hush, mouth.
Quiet Quiet Quiet

lightning bugs always know where to find me.

I mean this literally. I mean they consistently land on my fingertips when I’m gesturing, I mean, they rest on my shoulders when I’m dancing, I mean they find my knees when I’m wandering.


I’m perpetual motion.

They flit onto my skirt from my parents field in the forest, dozens of ecstatic chromatic insects, missing my tonsils this time and tickling the back of my neck.

And I’m clothed in phosphorescent resplendent incandescent light.

you are splatter-painting in my living room
bright red like blood,
like the light in the room from that day you took me away
framed in the center.
"Oh."
we chase and try to catch the moon, but it isn’t out tonight, so

we hold each other instead.
I use my garden as a tightrope and you challenge me like a ringmaster.
I’m in a spangled leotard, turning for you, charming under the ink sky, and you go inside to make me some smores.


You said you couldn’t stay over because you had work in the morning, but I woke up to your elbows and my coffee.

hazelnut coffee cup
cotton button down
hem my skirt
hem my thoughts about your hands
your belt left bruises
your teeth leave marks
your eyes leave me without

It’s a bit like climbing up the stairs to the very top of the tallest building in your neighborhood. You do it alone, completely alone, after working at some cafe a mile from your house. You count out your tips, put on your headphones, and slip into your own world as the humans, the families, the students, all become some sort of impromptu choreography. They are all silhouettes and so are you.
You take the long way home because you are tired and you don’t feel like crossing the bridge alone and hopping the fence. The tall building taunts you, leering. You meant to climb to the top with someone else, with anyone else, but today you are alone.
It’s thirty six floors. It’s the second-largest-something-or-other’s-wayward-dedication-to-knowled­ge, but regardless of the history, it’s made of stone and it’s enormous, so obviously, you must climb it. You are alone.
You walk inside. You do not belong there, and the maintenance man looks at you strangely, but you realized a long time ago that being slight of stature and pretty and female lets you get away with a lot more than you should, and besides, you are a silhouette now anyway.
Climb the stairs. It takes an hour or so. Each step feels the same. Look around, tie your hair up. It’s getting so so so long, you’ve taken to braiding it most days. Think about kissing boys. Think about ******* boys. Think about the time you kicked a boy’s heart in the teeth as a casualty of running away from everything else. Climb faster. Think of anything else. Think of loneliness. Think of sandwiches, think of dancing, think of Greek poetry. Take a rest. Climb. Think. Climb. Climb.

The top is three glass windows and two offices and one library. Sit on the windowsill and think of how small your hands are. Tie your hair up again. Headphones off. It is your nature to want too much, so by the time you get to the top, you wonder about the roof.

The old man living next door to my rented shoebox

told me that the hospitals are slowly draining the humanity from the city

and that the country is just animality rationality fictionality

and that at least when there was a king, everyone had food.

now his wife can’t pick things up because her hands hurt

so she throws things

constantly

and at least in India, he knew where he stood.

"My granddaughter on the fifth of July will be coming into her ninth year of life. She wants the world, though."

**** the way you say nonsense syllables because it makes me weak in the knees.
Your verbalization of a non-vernacular, space-filling, time-stealing thought
makes me melt like Popsicle Boy’s spine when he realized he couldn’t chase the lightning bug anymore.
You’re just two steps shy of blind in more ways than one, and your ribcage is such a terrible pillow.

Um.