there once was a lonely, bored girl
who did nothing but dream about the world
things she would be
places she would go
only after she grew up, you see
she waited for this day
she searched high and low
if you hope for it, it will happen, they say
so she hoped and hoped and hoped it would show

it’s always nice when you feel thirsty and you look over at your cup and it is full.

it’s much nicer than when you look over and see an empty cup.

i think this is what they call optimism, but i’m just talking about kool-aid here.

inanimate objects that have a life breathing inside of them. always on, always blinking, changing, humming, glowing, but never moving. no real breath, but there is life. the wires inside are warm and working, sending transmissions, signals, data, never even knowing that they exist. they are quiet wires, on which i depend so much.

i feel like i’m waiting, always just waiting, waiting for something, anything, to happen.

i’m waiting for that time when we can just get into a car and drive and drive and dive into the ocean, our bare skin squishing the seaweed into the pebbles underfoot.

that time when the sky is always blue, so blue it’s purple, and the grass is the greenest and winter is so so far away. far away in time and geography.

i crave travel. i crave closeness and conversation. likeness and togetherness and warm feelings.

i want to create. i want to create and destroy and create again from the shattered, scattered pieces.

i live to live, i love to live, i love to love,

and yet i sit here, disenchanted, just sitting.

nothing is more suffocating than winter.

We travel cross-city, cross-country, cross-continent. On bikes, on buses, on foot, in cars not driven by either of us. We carry bags of treasure that aren’t touched. Sustained by crushed gold fish and iconically-Canadian ***** of fried dough. Wind in our hair, belongings under x-rays, moving at a crawl through underwater paths, our bodies touch.

Marisol hated doing the dishes. She would stomp the ground and slam the doors.

She hated!

Hated!

HATED! doing the dishes.

That is, until one day, when the sink swallowed her up!

Little Marisol
twisted and turned
through the pipes,
up and down around the house,
until finally!
she was
spit
out
of
the
pipes
into a magical underwater kingdom!

"we never touch people so lightly that we do not leave a trace" (peggy tabor millin).

watching daytime tv, oprah yelling at audience members for going through the express checkout with fifteen items,
your hand rested my thigh, keeping it, keeping me, warm.

you lifted your hand.
tiny lines left in my skin. pressed from your palm.

mirror image palmistry.