You're funny. When you smile it's like the moon resurfacing over the tide and your eyes aren't stars. But fireflies from the bottom of the box of childhood which I keep in a chest within my chest. In the garden that night, I jumped around and caught those flickering gods and stole them if only momentarily from their kingdoms which stood like metropolitan cities...and the lighted tube that zigzagged like lightning across the heart of that city was simply my heart escaping from me. I liked that night. I must have been about seven or eight. Or five or twenty. Because time does not exist in this chest within the chest. And my childhood never ends. So I'm surprised when I see you sitting across from me.
And for a moment I wonder if you can hear my words floating from the other side of the glass. If the glass exists at all. Sometimes it flickers, you see...like the fireflies. Sometimes even I wonder about my 20/20 vision. Maybe all this time I've been blind. And if so, then I'm glad that I see you. It makes the darkness sleeping underneath the light of my room during the early morning hours bearable. Do you know that you make the night feel more like a mystery than a refuge? And now I've got bags under my eyes which are heavy carrying images of things I don't understand. Of places I haven't been to before but are familiar, like yellow Post-It notes on the refridgerator.

....I don't know what you want exactly. Or what any of the things that are unravelling have to do with me. But we are talking now. And I've stopped shivering so that I could listen to you breathe.



- 10.14.09   9.55 PM