Two nights ago I sat above the new apartment sign, my naked body dangling on its brick-laid edge. Cramped lights seared the parts of my legs they touched and it reminded me of watching pieces of fish in the oven. A breeze skated across my upper arm and ******, making me cold but awakening warm memories, ones taken from the house in the city that I cannot outrun. The fingers on my right hand prodded a cigarette into the crack of my lips as I tried to remember those four numbers, 37 and 62, and the circumstances under which I had deemed myself happy.

It seemed that we were almost-always-unabashedly *******, or at least I was, but there was that thoroughly **** time-- the night at the lake. Graceless games of Truth or Dare escorted shots of ***** into our mouths and conducted secrets out. Bottles’ tin caps clicked open as we split the clear contents inside, shook the smaller one, held it to the nose, waited for the levels of our laughter to rise like specs in the night sky: Pop, pop, pop! Up and up we went, watching down below, leaving life behind, fading away like the dimmed city stars.

I pulled the cigarette out of my mouth, releasing the white smoke. My mind searched for a time in life when smiling had come so easily, but the answer stayed the same.

The time I saw New York
I cried
I cried for all the things I could remember
in a thin burgundy slip on some empty set of stairs

It was two minutes before midnight
“A New Year”
Something I wanted so much to be true
but I hid my face and wept

When I saw
that all the young girls and old men
in fancy clothes down below
didn’t disappear
or move or change

Instead, danced in circles
mirroring the portraits of my shame

Spinning
around and around,
Stuck in their own involuntary pulls
of gravity

I waited
for what felt like a day
in a glass room with skin-colored curtains
things going in, things coming out

He came in, panting hard
and kneeled beside the cold table where I sat
Face reddening in the cheeks
on the nose,
just like mine

When I told him,
two tears fell out of each his eyes
and I thought
I was made
of stone

He carried me through the wet April snow,
put us in a cab
and took me home

There was a bath running
and steam on the mirror

I got undressed for the third time that day
and sank
into the hot
white bubbles

He held my right knee
with his left hand
and told me
we weren’t going to school tomorrow

Someone once close to me
will whisper something significant

And my eyes will wander

Over hills
and small lakes
Through the houses of the young

But no sights of the known
will be seen

Because I will have forgotten

I come here to ******* and cry
where it is silent and loud at the same time

the porcelain statues watch and release temporal tears
in a painful response
to my nonsensical quivering of the mouth
and squinting of the eyes

there it is again
that baked salt
on the roof of my mouth, the ends of my fingernails

It almost came last night,
but I stopped it with a breath before it got close
to ruining me again