There is smoke between your braces
My teeth shatter on touch
It is dry ice; a phantom
There is a blur in your speech
Blood trickles down your gums
And onto your tongue
Stop
Please, stop
Sometimes I wake
To your mouth sealed shut
Because you'd clenched your jaws so hard that blood filled your mouth
I haven't figured it out, but I think
It is the wisp of a nightmare that haunts you
It carries into morning
Settles in the crook of your teeth
To spill long into evening
Look at me
I’m sorry
I bring out the worst in everyone
I trace phantoms into corpses
Long dead but still living in me

There is an other, there, in the mirror. Memory space. A body without a head.
There is movement. Abstract thought.
A girl moves her lips. Air brushes against your own, but it is foreign. The staccato of her breath moulds waves of language. Indivisible meaning that slips your grasp.
Traffic stills. Fumes rise from cracked pavement. A child sleeps under a rusting skyline. A mother overdoses.
It is Autumn. Cold snatches another eight, or eighty. Cells rearrange, and a man finds himself changed. He holds a knife to your throat. You laugh until he cries.
The train comes late. You walk around the block to **** time. You find you no longer recognise the buildings surrounding you.
There is misery in your reflection, but it is just the other looking back and smiling.

I have walked this earth a thousand times.
Dirt. A loose aggregate of particles, held together by gravity, and moisture.
Rain. Water suspended. Resurging. Cascading in plumes, like sheets of smoke.
Sky. Blue. Stretched like canvas. Abstract. Nowhere. Everywhere.
I exist. Here. Standing. Thinking.
I am dead. I am being born.
I am existing across all time and space, but I do not know it.
At this moment, I am trapped. I am unconscious. I am unaware.
I have walked this earth a thousand times, and cannot even remember.
Because it has not happened. Has yet to happen. May never happen.
Future. A nonexistence on the horizon.
Hope. An ache. A nothing replaced with nothing.
Misery. The wretched face in the mirror.
A child wears my eyes. She drifts through life.
Scared. Alone. Free.
She plays in the forest. Her small, sap-covered hands grasp branch after branch.
She enters intermediate school. Is called freak. Is judged by her skin, her eyes.
She realises she is different for the first time.
Alien. Deviant. Other.
Her eyes fill with self-hatred.
I have watched this moment a thousand times, yet can do nothing.
Disintegration. The act of separation.
Loneliness. A billion strangers condemned to live together.
Existence. A billion billion billion particles, shifting beneath my flesh.
There is no death that can end my being.
I have felt the atoms of my past collide, and spark into biology.
I have felt the atoms of my future shred like fractals, spiralling into a dim, dark nothingness.
I have felt all this, and none of it.
From infinity I came, to infinity I’ll go. Forever cycling in the pantomime of existence.
This pretend construct of space and time.

No, that’s not how it goes.
Start again.
Do you remember the tree on the lake?
It was a forest.
No, it was black, like tar. It tasted like broken glass.
I remember the incense on the drapes.
Yes. It clung to our clothes.
You cried.
No, I smiled.
You cried smiling.
Yes.
I hate it when this happens.
What happens?
You know?
No.
Um. Sometimes it feels like the world is too crowded with words. Like it's too dense to speak.
That--
Like there’s something in the air that pushes against my throat.
There was a black dog, just then.
What?
Outside. It’s gone now. Sorry. Start again.
Do you remember the tree on the lake?
There was a raven.
Yes.
It was black like tar.
It caught a worm once.
Ravens don’t eat worms.
Yeah. It just sat there, with the worm in its beak. The worm squirmed, wrapping itself round the beak, over and over.
Is that why you were crying?
It wouldn’t stop. It kept going, digging its flesh deeper into the edges.
What was your father doing?
Smiling.
Why?
He’d filed for a divorce earlier.
Right. I wasn’t there.
No, you weren’t.
Do you regret locking the doors?
Sometimes I can taste the rain before it comes. It’s a skill I’ve had for as long as I can remember.
I’m lost. So your father was smiling?
No, he was crying.
Sorry. I swear I just--nevermind. Start again.
There was a storm in these parts when we were young. The worst storm in a hundred years.
I don’t remember.
You slept through it. I held your hand all night.
Why?
Because I was alone.
You still are.
Yes.
I hate it when this happens.
What happens?
You know?
Yes.
Where have you been?
Everywhere but here.
And where will you go?
Nowhere.
Sometimes when I look at you, it’s like looking through static. It’s like I’m looking at an impression of a person.
I get that a lot.
It’s like all my memories of you have blurred together. Vague feelings rise out of the haze. Feelings I recognise, yet cannot describe. I cannot connect them with who you are, what we were, or where we’ve been. It’s--
Like exiting a dream.
Yes. Exactly.
You feel a gap in your soul. One that has always been.
Always been. You held my hand, once.
During the worst storm in a hundred years.
When was that?
Every night.

I can taste her scent, riding on the morning breeze. It is of empty swing sets; dead Autumn leaves.
It is unnaturally cold. She is waiting for me, but I cannot find her.
Summer has fled my skin.
I sink with each step. I cry out, but my mouth stays closed.
I cannot find her. I cannot find her. I cannot—

I am staring into a convenience store. Gaudy labels, bright neon.
The air smells of soy sauce and sweat. A foreign sun blinds me.
Lucy’s father is waiting for his receipt, hand stretched for eternity.
I want to scream out. I want to run up to him and shake him loose of the death that will consume him and his family.
But all I can do is sink; hand stretched for eternity.

I am crying. There is a luggage bag in the hallway, clothes strewn to its side.
Mother is shouting, but she does not know it.
‘Ten more years’, she says, ‘ten more years’. I have never seen father so angry.
I don’t want to watch. I want to disappear. I want to sink into the walls.
My existence has led to this moment; this moment that I will not understand for another eight years.
‘Ten more years.’ Mother slams the door. An engine starts, but I am gone.

Perhaps, I never resurface.

Jesus came wrapped in paper and coated in tape
Saw the sender and fell to my knees
Felt my body sink right through the earth
Felt time reverse

Was a child crying beneath the bridge
Watched his mother and father pulled to the sea
Stopped for a moment before pretending
I didn’t see a ******* thing

Should have opened my heart long ago
******* wasted on my own problems

I crawled through service
I collapsed at the grave

Can’t shake the sweat from my tips
Can’t wash the guilt from my sheets
What the hell happened to me?
What the hell happened?

It’s hard to see you here
In a summer heat I no longer remember

Maybe I smiled once
And you smiled back.