There are people who are always not you

I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end.—  Jack Gilbert, Waking At Night

finding love during a global pandemic where most of the world is under house arrest, is a very "me" move, I've decided. A love confined to state sanction regulations. Let this be a testament of this oddity, where everything went to shit but then also didn't. I'll never forget zoom, skittish around strangers, the smell of peppermint hand sanitizer, the smell of cork, standing awkwardly near friends, the desire of impulsivity, the queer dreamy state we have to be in in order to survive, in order to maintain a semblance of hope. I think I'll become a better person after this, hopefully a kinder one. Though, a relentless kindness is something that I've been nurturing for a long time coming. Anger, disdain, ill will and jealousy have never served me. It feels idiotic when idioms are true. The spectacle that inverts reality must begin on time so I suppose my time is now.

Days alone always feel like I'm waiting. Every moment a sermon. During my walk the lamplight audibly cracks and I laugh. You had bad dreams. But that's not the kind of fun we are having. I cannot wait to see emerald moss, the kind that coats for centuries. Lichen will always turn on you. We realize the impossibility of saying anything and staying unnatural. My most paranoid friends are right. They always have been and it's frankly annoying, get some imagination. Stay absolutely foolish. God, this very dumb urge to romanticism. Such a precise itch. What if I had met you at the store. What if I met you in subway air. We keep saying there's no rules so perhaps that means I can send you that Linda Pastan poem and one day see the most terrible amber imaginable. Forgo language for smizing and use the didactics of objects as verbs. Perhaps this is stupid, perhaps it'll pass like a fever dream, we would both laugh at the economies of longing. But bravery, without bravery you'll never realize the scope of your capacities.


There's a cubby in emotion for recollections.