when I write, I think about the things I will never feel again, like stepping out of my bedroom to my mother resting her head on my stepfather’s shoulder, quiet, in the hallway, or how I almost lost my virginity at three o’clock in the afternoon to a boy with skin smooth and pale as seashells clawed open, or having the future be only illustrated in tomorrows, or seeing the indian ocean for the first time, and having it be nowhere near as bright in the stories I had been told.

and if I had made up all those memories who is to say that they’re not real? if a single sentence can take me along coastlines and through waters, who is to say that I cannot make my body the sail, and with the wind filling it, continue long after the place where memory ends and absence begins? if I, perhaps, disappeared on the 19th of february, who is to say, on paper, that it is not the 19th of february that disappeared instead?