Written for Trans Day of Visibility 2025.

//

When the sky opens, the world will be wider than you ever imagined. When the sky opens, every one of your senses will sharpen. When the sky opens, you will start to differentiate the clouds from the fog — cirrus, stratus, cumulonimbus. Their names will dissolve sweetly on your tongue, each tasting in turn of salted plum; smoked paprika; chili & lime. You will wonder at the shifting blue that emerges from the grey. You will marvel at all the new shades of sunrise. When the sky opens, you will smell all manner of wild grasses on the breeze, catching winks of vanilla and citrus, wild ginger, clay. When the sky opens, you will hear the birds conversing with the wheat. When the sky opens, you will hold yourself under the warm sunlight, finding all your darling freckles and moles, as well as scrapes and bruises you never noticed, and soft hands to tend them, too. 

When the sky opens, you will love stillness more than outrunning your own feet. When the sky opens, you will dream of aging instead of aching for a grave. When the sky opens, you will be equal parts frightened and ready. When the sky opens, you will be shocked by the expanse of the horizon. The mist will roll away, revealing where your small patch of earth kisses the outstretched arms of an enormous meadow blooming with sparkling life. 

Here, the endless sky. Here, a deep breath. Here, a word: welcome.

Published in the anthology We/Us: Monologues for the Gender Minority in 2022.

//

This is a ritual for a longtime ache. It was given to me by a lover, passed through countless achey bodies since the beginning of time. For this ritual, you will need: A mirror. A cup of baby powder. A Magic 8 Ball. A jar with a lid. A scrap of paper — maybe a clipping from the day's newspaper, or an article about clouds or butterfly migration patterns. A sprig of lavender and pine. A flute of champagne or sparkling cider. And, of course, a longtime ache.

First, assess the wound. Take your time — this is best done unhurried. Begin by identifying its location. You may want to sit in front of a mirror for this part. I recommend low lighting by candle, so you can see the place where the ache glows in the dark. Does it live in your chest? Your hands? Your throat? Is it a stinging red, or does it shimmer in waves like an algae bloom? If it has lived in you for a while, then it may resemble a network of tunnels and pipes, its joints swollen where it has gasped out new limbs. Has the skeleton receded so that it forms a makeshift frame to hang the flesh, and does the flesh sag under its own weight?

Next, mark the ache with baby powder. Try to mark it gently, even if you are alarmed, so as not to spook the ache, which can hear you and feel your touch. Remember that a wound hiding is not healed — only hiding. If startled, the ache may try to retreat, so you may hold it in clarity by speaking softly to it. Do this as you would with a small child.

Then close your eyes. On an inhale, think of the way survival often looks very ugly. On an exhale, think of the way it is the body's labor of love. Keep your eyes closed. You may feel the seconds begin to slur into minutes, the minutes into hours. This is as true as anything else. Imagine relieving the body of its labor and leaving its love, so that the love swells to fill the empty space left in labor's absence. There is as much space for this as there is for anything else. Consider its potential enormity.

Open your eyes. Pick up the Magic 8 Ball. Ask it a question you don't know the answer to. Shake for its reply.

Ignore its reply. Consider that you actually did know the answer after all.

Count each of your fingers and toes. Count your eyes. Count the steps you've taken in your lifetime. Count the inches you've traveled. Count the brains in your head. Count the tongue in your mouth. Count the times you've held it. Make estimated guesses where necessary.

Now, think of a secret promise you will make to your ache. This does not need to be a salve, and it does not need to be big, nor does it need to be fixed or precise. Open the jar and breathe into it as if you are filling a balloon, or a lung. Breathe life into it. Breathe every life you've lived into it — and, still, after all of them, maybe the hope for one more. The ache will not empty into the jar, but instead cling to your insides — that's to be expected. You're writing an ode, not a eulogy. Take the scrap of paper in your hands. Kiss your promise into it. Put the paper in the jar. Reattach the lid. Poke holes in it to make sure it can breathe.

You may have figured this out already, but this ritual will not cure the ache. In fact, it is possible that the ache is incurable. You may be tempted to stretch the sagging skin taut, snip away the excess with a pair of scissors, dig a blade into your makeshift frame, try to drain it all out. You may be tempted to try scaring the ache away, or to get angry with it, or to punish it. Think of this: After all that living, the hope for one more life. Think of your enormity, both potential and prevailing. The seconds-minutes-hours slinking along, blown wide, real as anything. The nameless numbered things in your body. The unnumbered nameable things in your body. Add your sprig of pine and lavender to your champagne or sparkling cider. Do this ritual once or many times. Cheers.

Written for The Playground Experiment’s 2024 Faces of America Monologue Festival.

//

Throughout the monologue, this character is applying gorgeous stage makeup in their dressing room.

Did I always know? No. No, I read Girls' Life magazine. I wanted to play Johanna. One year, I wore a Cinderella costume for the whole summer — no, nobody made me. They couldn't get me to leave the house without it! You know, when I first told her, my mom asked me how I could be a man if I liked wearing dresses as a kid. I didn’t have an answer. "But you're so beautiful!" She was crying, I was crying 'cause I made her cry. I couldn’t explain it, how I could want what I wanted but not what I had... I loved feeling beautiful. I could contour like nobody's business. When I was 22, I was in this grungy little dive — it was their karaoke night — and I heard a guy sing "Green Finch and Linnet Bird," and that's how I realized. Isn't that funny? I didn't even know him, but God, he was beauty, he was grace. That's when it clicked. A boy princess. A beautiful boy princess. Ah, is that places? Great. I'm ready.

is how it starts. I ask you to move in, but you say there's too much furniture. So it's you and I on the highway then. You and I on the back roads, you and I blasting Springsteen. You and I flashing the drivers on the bridge. You and I drinking from the flask you keep in your boot, drinking on the hood of the car, drinking, and never touching, and puking our guts into the gravel. You and I stopping at the roadside diner with the dog on the chain out front, you and I ordering sweet teas and bun-meat-bun burgers from the waitress who gives you eyes so I snap up the bill ("together, thanks"). You and I playing punch buggy for every JESUS SAVES billboard ("then what are we paying him for?"). You and I at the motel, eating Froot Loops by the screen door with the space heater whirring, you and I on the balcony, looking down at the pool and waving at our rippling shadows (but I'm only looking at yours), you and I flipping them off, throwing Froot Loops into the water ("for the fish"). You and I in the room, and it's cold, I'm cold over here, and you're cold over there, and there's room here if I fold back the sheets, and you can see where this is going, and isn't it a beautiful story, and don't you love to hear me tell it, but I think this is the part where I mess it up. Or maybe it was the furniture after all. There wasn't any room for your coffee table, but you know what, I don’t need my sofa. I don't even like that sofa. I never did. Just tell me which part it was, and I'll change it. I’m still writing the story. These are words on a page. Was it the Springsteen? It can be Twisted Sister. I'll free the dog on the chain. I'll let you split the bill. I'll make you pancakes. We'll go to church. I'll learn the scripture. I'll speak the holy Jesus things. I could be an angel next time. I could be a god. There. Is that how it ends?

i've seen men who move mountains on the screens at the weekend matinees

men with silver tongues and iron wills, turning earth to gold

and i've also seen them in the empty seat i save

when you don't show

out there writing your own stories on your feet

and i wonder where the men who love the men who move mountains are

and whether the men who move mountains

go to the movies with them

or not

and how like me, absenting myself, waiting in the dark

while behind the projection window,

busy, purposed hands feed a spool into the reel

(because telling someone’s story is a story too a story too a story too)

unfurl a ribbon of a life

and as for mine,

i think i left it in a bedside pillbox

choked it off with the cuff of a wrist monitor

and wouldn't know it now by the face it wears

when it says yes

or doesn’t when it says no and no and i can’t

and the yes is spooled out anyway

see, the things you need

for a high-wire act

are the feet on the wire

and the feet on the ground that

love the feet on the wire but

love the ground too and

will wait on the pavement

to be seen on the pavement

not being the feet on the wire

what i mean is i am not a moving picture

but i might be a mirror

what i mean is i know the men who part seas from the book of exodus

and when i sink

to the tiles

and look up at the sky—

which is to say, you—

quivering behind the film of the surface

then bursting forth—

like shattering a window

like meeting me on the ground—

are you parting the seas

or disrupting my reflection?

and is there any difference between the two?

the thing is

i don't know how to insist upon myself

and i never know what the men on the screens are saying

too busy deciding how to turn you down

the next time the next time the next time

you call

some lives are altars to other lives

and some homes are altars to the absent things

(myself, myself, my life, a face, your feet)

which is to say i’m sick

which is to say i’m hungry

which is to say

i’m more than i can say

i still think about that day

in the weekend matinee

when you stopped writing your own stories on your feet

and sat watching the men with silver tongues and iron wills

move mountains

with me

and at the plot twist you turned to me

said "cheap trick"

your breath hot in my ear

told me

"we could write a better ending"

and what i meant to say was

"when can we start?"

(because we can be a story too a story too a story too)

but what i did instead was try to move the mountain

and try to mount the wire

and try to press my mouth to yours

and hunger is a kind of sickness too, isn't it?

and there’s an empty seat

and the lights come up

and the credits roll

and when i make my final dive

i hope i'll have hitched my rocket tight to your star

as it hurtles away

so i'll have no choice but to burn out in the air

You become an angel.

That’s how this story starts.

You become an angel.

The way you become an angel is not grand. You shuck your hoodie over your head and your wings emerge from beneath it. You hear new radio frequencies. You develop a taste for barley. You go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and see the glimmer of your halo reflected in the mirror over the sink. You are not a religious person, but now you are an angel.

You are not a religious person, although you were raised vaguely methodist as a child, following your family’s stint at the small brick presbyterian church where you went to Scout meetings and vacation bible school and where a drive-through nativity was held every year. You were part of the nativity once or twice in elementary school, and you always wanted to be one of the angels, who donned white gowns and over-the-shoulder gold wings and headband haloes. The beautiful — usually blonde — girls at church were cast as angels. You were always cast as something a little less glamorous — a lamb, a nondescript townsperson. Maybe the production committee sensed something less than divine in you. Nevertheless, now you are an angel.

When you were four years old, you made your first and only runaway attempt. It was June in Austin, and you had decided you wanted to see the light-up nativity scene posted up at the far edge of your family’s neighborhood. Time meant nothing to you. You assumed it would take three days to walk to the nativity scene, just as you assumed the scene was readily on display for the summer rather than tucked away for the season in someone’s garage.

You exited through the front door and made it halfway across the lawn when one of your family’s neighbors, who was watering his grass, waved at you. You ran crying back to the front door, where your mom was waiting for you. You were not a good runaway, and now you are an angel.

The summer after fifth grade, you put up your first-ever middle finger. It was in your grandparents’ house in Houston, when no one else was around. You tried your hand at this notoriously wicked gesture by pointing it directly at the floor with your eyes squeezed shut. “For Satan,” you said aloud. Then, something occurred to you: what if the devil actually lived in the sky, and heaven was at the center of the earth? There was no way to know for sure. You pointed your middle finger at the sky, just for good measure. “Sorry, God,” you said. Just for good measure.

The way you become an angel is not grand. There’s no thunder or lightning, no sweeping orchestral song, no heavenly choir. Which is alright. You’ve never heard of anyone becoming an angel, so your expectations are pretty low. But — and here’s the thing — there’s also no revelation. Whatever cosmic telephone wire in your head was supposed to deliver you some great directive from on high, it’s quiet. The line is dead. No one is there. It’s just you in your apartment with the radiator hissing and your tea going cold, open to anything you might hear from above, the anything which is nothing.

You go to the library, for the first time in many years. You check out all kinds of books titled things like The Encyclopedia of Angels and Angelology and Angels In Your Presence and even — and this one scares you — God’s Monsters. You read Genesis in its entirety out of a King James pocket edition in your bathtub with all your curtains closed and the sound of Bravo bleeding through your neighbor’s wall. You call out of work again and again. You read the Wiki page for “Names of God,” the Wiki page for “Voice of God,” then the Wiki pages for “Talking to God,” an independent dramedy, and “Talking God,” a crime novel, and “Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods,” a documentary about a comic book writer, which has nothing to do with anything, but is interesting nonetheless. You’re on Wikipedia so much that you finally give them five dollars when they ask you to.

You try speaking to God. You try speaking to God on your knees. In your mind’s eye, you imagine folding up a paper note for God and tossing it onto a cloud, or turning it into a paper airplane and shooting it out into space. You learn 15 prayers for God, and then you learn them again in Hebrew. You decide not to care about if God is listening. Then you decide to care desperately about if God is listening. You wonder if you’re saying his name wrong. You say it in the ways you hear it pronounced on Google, and then in ways you’ve never heard it pronounced at all.

Your friend Rena calls to ask if you’re okay, but she can’t hear your voice “over the sound of the river.” You tell her you’re in your kitchen. She hangs up. You try to text her, but everything you say turns into tree emojis. You’ve called out of work so many times, they don’t even call you anymore. You haven’t been hungry in a while.

You realize now that becoming an angel may mean unbecoming a human. You feel like an abandoned lover waiting by the phone. You’ve had your curtains closed for so long that now you’re afraid to open them.

You think about doubt. You imagine a balloon filled with doubt. You imagine slicing the string that tethers it to your grip and watching it float up, up, up and shrink to a pinprick in the air.

You wonder if this is about the middle finger. If your good measure was a bad idea. Everyone knows which way up is. Maybe he severed the line right then and there, and could you blame him if he did? You were never an angel. You were a one-time runaway, a lamb, a townsperson.

You think about what an angel is. A messenger. A weapon. You roll the word “verbatim” around in your mind a lot these days. Ditto “vengeance.” You think of destroying cities, killing firstborns. You think of soldiers and blood. You think of commandments passed down and obeyed.

You weren’t an angel, and now you are, and nobody is coming. You’re a messenger without a message, which makes you a ghost. A weapon without a wielder, which makes you a stone.

You think about what an angel is. You make a collage out of clippings from your old copies of Vanity Fair and Good Housekeeping. A burning flame, a cluster of wings and eyes, drying ink, architecture. Public transportation. Telephone wires. Sunlight. Gravity. A magnet. A vial of poison. A shadow that’s fuzzy around the edges. A weighted blanket. A kind of fungus. A lovely weed. A doting dog. A full stomach. A shepherd.

You’re not sure you’re any of those things, but you, in your apartment, are an angel.

There’s no revelation, except this one: There’s no one on the line. There’s no one on the line, except you.

You open your curtains. You become God.

That’s how this story starts.

The lake was behind a dogwood grove mapped over with kudzu

Its entry the brambled hollow of a honeysuckle bush

Doomed and sweet.

We dove in only once

Because we got it wrong—

Before he went in, he shucked his shoes off

And I held them, unthinking, palming his sweat on the soles like olive oil

And not remembering to put them down until he raised an eyebrow

("y'don't have to hold 'em")

And I felt stupid in my reverence.

I had teased him about those bit-up dog toy sandals

Because he teased me about the T-shirt I kept on all summer

Even in that plastic pool they kept beside the QuikMart tire pump

Beneath that merciless July blaze

I meant it to curtain my own burning hearth

But a little smoke was always leaking out of my ears anyway.

I watched him, unbreathing,

While he kissed his toes along the lip of the cliff's edge

And then slipped

Rolling his ankle on a too-slick groove

And plummeting into the river

Shattering its glass.

Not thinking, I leapt in after him

And it all churned by in smears of green

That cicada-rattled air smoothed to a slick, cool whoosh with my descent

Clipped by the billowing rumble as I broke the surface

And the thunk of my head on mossy stone

Then the patter of bubbles thinned

So I was looking at his body

His blood steaming skyward from a gash that licked the curve of his calf,

Like it had places to be.

He was upright, treading his light-rippled legs

With his head in the world again

Maybe watching the starlings ("gasoline birds") winking like Bics in the air

Or counting the pond skaters ("Jesus bugs") etching their nothing grooves.

We were alone for the first time

And everything but me was chugging toward the sun.

I wished with sudden force that he would dip back under

Bring his watery face close enough to mine

So we might laugh bubbles into each other's mouth

I wondered blankly how long we might survive like that

Eating the other's air.

Instead he plunged a hand down hard

And gripped me around the elbow

So I rose like breath

And he sloshed out and pancaked himself on the embankment

His chest heaving,

demanding itself,

like I might have if I were somebody else.

I sidled up near, my spine a question mark,

And ghosted my fingertips over his wound, never touching down.

"Some fuckin' cut," he said.

He oozed—

his blood was here to stay this time.

Squinting at the sky, then at me,

His brow unknitted like a sigh, just a little,

One hand lifting to my ear, never touching down.

He drew it back and licked his thumb

And pressed it to my temple.

He looked at me like an old, old thing.

My hand trembled when I lifted it to meet his

But it was gone before I could.

We didn't go back

But sucked the honeysuckles until they were bone-dry

And white in our scalloped fists.

i'm told it starts like this:

the gods are bowling

and the thunder is the sound of the pins in the alley,

and the lightning is the flash of the scoreboard beaming white,

and that's how we get the storm.

early earthly bodies slanted toward a bonfire

and one man

so much like the others,

and already met with language,

breathed this mythology into the night.

and the others listened and looked on with saucer eyes and sideways glances

all brightness and infirm delight

all begging for a bit of untruth.

he held the iron

and as he spoke

he circled it round the fire in the sand

and stoked the embers into little burning suns

and tried to lift one from its source

but found it fizzled out in smoke

and so prodded it into ash.

it also starts like this:

two kids are in the back of a car

not quite defrosted,

fumbling into half-nakedness

because we've cut the engine

and it’s awfully quiet here,

so somebody better start talking

or else occupy both mouths

with delight

or sand.

and suddenly we're shirtless and shivering

and thinking of the miles to burn between a hearth and a highway

and the generations to pass between a feeling and a word.

and what of the gods in the bowling alley?

and what of the man with the iron?

and what of our inheritance?

you offer to start the engine

and blast the heat.

"just lay against me," i say.

"it will be better."

and it is.

and we still don’t appear in the sacred texts,

but i'm the keeper of a new religion.

i invented it because i couldn't see over the ladies' sunday hats

and didn't know what the pastor was doing

with the bread and the wine.

mine is a very exclusive chapel—

chambers as cedars, and all that.

i circumvent my tenderness the way emily dickinson circumvents death;

by locking the doors.

truth be told, i would just like to sit very close to the fire

would even like to lay my body out over the coals

and rise grey and anonymous.

it seems a decadent thing,

to have been there,

to have seen the man speaking

to have been of the flock,

to know, and to dazzle gradually

or not.

here, my heart, laid out on the page

in precise and even measure,

i imagine i might have said.

here, my heart in my hands,

fuck a page

here, my mouth on yours

our inheritance

you know this story already.

i might have said this, but it isn't mine to say.

i use what i can.

i strike a match.

i light a flame.

By remembering, we drive a steel pin between the wings. It was always like this: you scratched your last name out of every yearbook you ever owned. Your body is three decades in a coil, and you want everyone to see your scraped-up elbows, but mostly you'd like them not to wish you well. At night, you summon the gospel music from the corner church across the long, white feather of fluorescent time and think of years passing like hospital lights wheeling overhead. When you were young, you scrapped in the dirt and raged against the river rocks, and made a mess of things, and I watched the movie monsters and ate lunch inside my own heart. You were skipping town every day, laying promises of railroad tracks to spite the city limits, while I sat by and counted quarters. You loved to bleed, man. You hoped a blow might rearrange your lineage, and when the whistle blew from across town, I saw a life pass over it like a low-hanging cloud. How does it feel knowing you're someone I look at? I learn it by your brow when it strikes you who you carry. What I mean is I wanna be the unfurling weather. What I mean is you don't have to sign the papers. What I mean is you don't have to take my name. In the morning, dress yourself in light and air. I'll take a million newnesses. We'll cut the thread. We'll bleed the bird. We'll lose the earth. You'll rise to the sky, and your shadow will ripple across town, stumping all the meteorologists. You could be a climate event. You could be anything at all.

when you wanted to begin but needed to know

the ending first

when you thought to surrender yourself

but needed the curtain-close promise

when you were sick-sweating on my bedroom floor

trying to jump out of your skin

and carving your hunger into the rust of the radiator

because you could eat nothing but saltines for a week

because of your dad’s burnt out brake light

because of the empty boots at the door

you were so ragged in your desperation

i thought you'd unravel like an old coat

and i hadn't sewn since i was nine

but i took the needle from the old kit anyway

and kept it all day in my breast pocket

hoping i'd either stitch you up like new

or maybe roll over on it

and bleed to death before i saw you fray

you beautiful terror. i used to call your house

even after you were gone

just to practice punching the numbers

like how we sloshed through the sewer by the tennis courts

throwing echoes in the freeway underpass

and it felt back then like calling a ghost

til i realized i was the one

doing the haunting

the only living soul at the house on woodburn

with the tattered chain link fence

and trashed up yard

what made me ill was it never went to voicemail

just rang and rang

daring me to hang up

made me think of that ugly panasonic

off the hook

on the kitchen counter

singing to an empty home

its raggedy phone-song voice hung in midair like the drip-thick honeysuckle heat

of that one wet-hot july

rich as the scent of the church lemon pound cake

that cupped its hands round all things loud and wild

and said "hey, now. you might be living. you might be so alive

you’d peel your whole life off you if you could"

but you were never one for mights and couldn'ts

no, just

endings. curtains.

hey, scary.

bring the lights back up.

the june bugs don’t know where to go

with your front porch beacon gone dark.

there’s an all-night diner now

out on eastway drive

i've got two clean pairs of galoshes

and a fever-rank coat

and a million new ideas

for how to mend the sun-worn spots

surrendered

sick-sweating

i'm hungry

i hunger.

let's eat.

I started going to church because I needed a place to nap. I'd sit in the balcony, in the furthest corner, folding into my hoodie. When the organ sang, it rattled the frames on their hooks. You could only see it with your temple to the wall.

The first time I saw you, I could tell you were new by the top of your head. Your hair was unparted; I was trying to make out the plot. Then a glint of flesh: first a reaching hand, then one sinewy slice of neck poking over the back of the pew. You were scratching the peach fuzzy space just between your shoulders. You slumped back down. I sat up.

I didn’t expect to see you the next week, but there you were. And again. Turn to your neighbor, they said at the end of the service, and the men in their ties and the women in their pearls unfolded to you with outstretched palms. Your gaze never left your lap. Your mother regarded you, laughed, shook her head. Slouching toward Bethlehem, I imagined her saying by way of explanation. If Adam had kept that rib, I might just be tall enough to see your fingers turning the corners, I thought, senselessly. Oh, to be that holy book.

When I moved to the main floor the next week, I thanked god or his intern you were there again, head bowed, across the aisle. I was wondering if piousness was learned or inherited when I spotted the corner of the DS in your hands. I couldn't contain a laugh, and you turned your blazing eyes to me. My breath caught at the angular symmetry of your face. I thought of seeded fruits. Which of us was burning?

The chapel was dark when I pulled back the curtain on the confessional to a rippling back curled in toward a wash of arcing bluish feathers. It seemed some grotesque creature, all rolling muscles, rounded spine, faceless flesh, quivering plumage, until the wings opened up and I glimpsed hands bracketing hips, caught a flash of a sinewy neck, then a sharp jaw with a mouth locked on the hollow underneath. A space opened up between the feathers. Your eyes flashed. A smirk eked at the corner of your lips, and you pressed a finger to them. And he drank of the wine, and was drunken. I thought I must have been dreaming, but you looked at me sideways during the sermon the next day.

The basketball court was where you first unfurled them for me. The street lamp spilled over your back and set your hair ablaze — his signet ring — but it also cast dark shadows under your brow and obscured your face. I felt my blood run to my heels. The bulb surged and shattered. There was a snapping noise before I adjusted to the black. I could just make out the disposable camera as you were lowering it, then a flash of teeth. You were grinning. The afternoon you got the roll developed, we sat on your floor propped up on our elbows, coloring my wide, blown out face with a paint pen to look like The Scream.

I wanted cereal for dinner, but all the dishes were broken at home. You and I stayed out all night in the field behind the laundromat with the gravel lot out back. We laid in the grass and held our hands up to the stars to see what we could scoop up. You turned onto your stomach and set your chin in your hands while I tried to recall the constellations.

I pointed, spread my arms wide, stopped. Looked at you. Shouldn't you know these?

You stared. I like to hear you say them.

We were talking about the VMAs over grilled cheeses when I asked about hell. You shrugged and picked at your crust. Not my department, you said. 

But you've been?

Yeah. Couple cookouts. Good barbecue.

You're being funny.

You plucked a grape from the bunch, turned it over in your fingers. I'm not trying. Popped it in your mouth. You never could tell a lie without smiling.

I'm the girl with the pastries in her basket

Tearing through the woods

Because the woods aren't empty

Because I love being alive

Because everything, even love, is desperation about being alive

And because these cookies won’t keep for long.

Only one of us dies at the end of this story, and she gets coughed up anyway.

So the grandma was half-digested.

Okay.

She's alive, isn't she?

Plus she's seen the inside of a stomach.

Hell, I wish it had been me.

I would've loved that stomach,

Because I was the only one there.

If I could choose a special power,

To help me tear through the woods,

It would be to never get hungry again.

I'm not sure how I still have an appetite,

Having seen the grandma half-digested.

But I brought these cookies, anyway. Might as well.

I'm forgetting myself.

Actually, I came here to say that

I'm sorry for the teeth in my mouth. I'm sorry for the hole in my belly.

Most teeth are okay, and most bellies are okay

But I think mine are canines, and that it might be empty for good.

Well, you've figured me out by now.

This dress is borrowed. I stole the basket.

So, here goes nothing,

The nothing which is everything,

Even love.

Here goes being alive.

I'm not the girl with the pastries in her basket.

I’m the one waiting in the woods

For the girl with the pastries in her basket

I'm forgoing the pastries

And eating the grandma.

I ate the girl with the basket too.

I don't want these cookies, and they won't keep,

So you should have them. Might as well.

There's a scene in a monster movie

Where his wings are coming in

And he's staring at the mirror

And carving bloody scratches into his back

To stop them from growing.

I know.

Everything is wings, and everything is angels, and everything is monsters, and everything is love, and everything is being alive,

Because I heard it in a story.

Look.

I thought I'd have wings,

But I just have teeth and a belly.

Some monsters are holy soldiers, and some monsters are holes and hungers,

And everything is the hole in my belly

Which I mistyped as holy just now.

Good god.

I wish my martyrdom fit me,

But it's borrowed,

And hangs like a sheet.

I'm not the girl with the basket,

So I ate the girl with the basket,

And the worst part is I'm not full.

I'm sorry, for the record,

I know, I'm a broken record,

But I've been waiting in the woods,

And we only have old stories there.

the moon was an adaptable girlfriend. i (selfishly, perhaps) admired her contortion. (she did yoga). she was so without pretense — disarmingly so. she was a contagious lover of all shapes of herself. i was quietly grateful that between us two, one of us went bare-faced. i couldn't hack it. "i'm not that brave," i lamented once before my mirror as i smeared concealer over my own cratered cheeks. her shift had just ended, and i could see her reclining on my bed behind me, propped against my pillows as her co-worker set to work, and that new wash spilled in and pooled in the folds of the comforter, and in her scars. when she said "at least you have the daytime," her eyes shone. she'd try to move her shifts around, try to widen the overlap in our waking moments, but they never stuck. against our best efforts, it petered out. i haven't worn makeup since.

the moon is actually recording. i'm sorry to be the first to tell you. there are little gleaming spools in a little cassette tape in a little gray califone ac/dc recorder, whirring vaguely under a thin coating of moon dust. someone left it running there, oh, i don't remember how long ago. since you came along, i suppose. when you stepped out into the parking lot for that smoke after the high school reunion, turned your chin up, unfurled a hot breath, an "oh god," into the falling snow, it sprang forth 238,900 lightyears and slotted neatly into that small machine. so did the raucous dawn on the roof. the burbling, ecstatic sunset on the highway. so many cries announcing that flight from the hollowing liminality of december to january, december to january, december to january. there is so much of you living up there. when you leave this place, you'll keep spinning up there. you've got your stereo. shall i deliver you to yourself?

the moon will be a successful vehicle. i mean, we'll get great mileage. i mean, we'll push 85 without breaking a sweat. i mean, we'll take the back roads. i mean, we'll stop at that diner you like. i mean, when you say "mmmm" after your first bite, i won't tease you. i always liked it. i'll wipe your mouth. i mean, we'll have time. i mean, i'm sorry for the time i wasted. we'll have more. don't be scared. i mean, it happens to the best of us. i mean, anything can happen. i mean, meet me on the moon. i mean, i'll come. i'll come. i'll come. i'll come. i'll come. i'll come. i'll come.

No peace like whale-watching. No fear like whale-watching. I still haven't read Moby-Dick. I hope they’re all friends in the end. I know they're not, and still I hope, which is what makes me so dreamy, and so unteachable. This is determinedly not a love poem, except that everything is a love poem in the end. Even Moby-Dick; they want him bad. I envy the guy. To die at someone's hand is to be chosen, which is why all the great horror stories are also great love stories. I ache at slashers. Sometimes I think I'd lay down in front of the blade just to be touched by something opinionated. Wouldn't you like to get under my skin and see all my stupid red parts? I don't want to be friends. I want to be an ambition.

No peace like whale-watching. I still hope they're all friends in the end. I know what makes me so dreamy, and so unteachable: that everything is a love poem in the end. Moby-Dick; they want him bad. I envy the guy. All the great horror stories are also great love stories. I ache at the blade touched by something opinionated. Wouldn't you like to be friends, to be an ambition?

Whale-watching still makes me so dreamy. That love poem Moby-Dick; they want him bad. I envy the blade touched by ambition.

these days i am seeking the joy-making things. here's one: there's a 131-year-old library in pennsylvania with an empty swimming pool out back. the library is closed, so no one is checking books out. but they're still making returns. the return box fills up faster than the books can be sorted and re-shelved, so the staff has to pile them into trash bags and store them in the swimming pool. somewhere out there in pennsylvania: huge personless library, huge book-filled swimming pool.

i like to imagine the books sans bags, spilling out in vibrant disarray. like maybe you could take a running leap and swan dive into them, making the pages flutter. like maybe the letters might spray out around you, forming new, heat-rippled words. no hardcover corners or paper cuts to spoil your fun. you could simply emerge dripping with story. you could simply pour yourself into the new world and receive yourself anew. what i'm saying is let this remake me. what i'm saying is i want to invent my inheritance. what i'm saying is i hope i have the language on the other side. don't towel off just yet. meet me there.

I.

on the first day, it rains. the morning is a fog, save for one sharp snapshot of a shaggy-haired boy in a purple hoodie in the front row. and then, the cafeteria alights with color. where is she? more blurring. purple. too hot. too hot. this is how he lands in a bathroom stall, finds himself downing a pb&j over the brown paper sack folded across his lap. she comes to him in fourth period, brow creased, mouth wilted. "i tried to find you." the rain pools in a gutter just outside. drip. again. drip. "i tried to find you."

II.

he swallows his breath and watches the boy through the slats in the closet door, can see him padding along the carpet, quirking his brow, tilting his chin. the boy purses his lips, hums in concentration. dabs his tongue to his finger to gauge the wind. he, the one in the closet, has to gnaw his bottom lip and stifle a giggle with the back of his hand. and then — pad pad pad — there is a quick closing of distance, and his eyes are blown wide as the light pours in. the boy is beaming. "there you are. found you."

III.

two girls lie side by side on the floor of the treehouse they’ve spent the summer building, devotedly hauling wood in wheelbarrows under the honey-dipped mississippi heat.

"y'hear that?" she asks, and what she means is the cicadas, and also her heart.

"yeah," says the other. she swipes the back of her hand across her beading temple. "why do they do that?"

"to find each other, i think."

they still again and cast their ears into the sky. the first girl crooks her pinky and hooks it around the other's. squeeze. it might be the brightest thing in the dark.

LIGHTS UP on your childhood dog, the one your parents took to the vet when you were three who never came home. She is sleeping in a heap on a comforter, the same one you discarded when the room got too hot last night, her ribs rising and falling steadily. Her yellow fur is scattered around her. She was always shedding all over the floor and the furniture, so her fur got in your mouth and food and seemed a nuisance, until after your parents took her to the vet when you were three and she never came home, and then the fur started to go, little by little, and then you saved what you could find on the bedside table until it blew away. But here she is now, sleeping, with that whole coat of yellow fur, so beautiful you could cry.

You rise from your seat in the house. YOU ENTER DOWNSTAGE CENTER, climbing over the orchestra pit and hauling yourself over the lip of the stage. You cross to her, kneel, and fold into her side, enveloping her with outstretched arms. She wakes and her tail starts going, and she licks you all over your arms and neck and mouth. You realize you are crying into her side, and her fur is sticking to your face, to your eyes and lips and tongue. You vaguely remember you were supposed to see a play tonight, and there was an audience. Everything is living memory. It doesn’t matter now.

Somewhere, long after dark, he pores over an encyclopedia under his sheets. This is a private ritual. He lifts each cover as if to ventilate his own lungs, hungering for words but needing something like grace. He makes no mystery of his appetite. He could pluck any distant constellation you wanted from the sky and place it in your open palm, but he could never call me by my name. Outside, there is dry earth, and beyond that an empty mailbox, and beyond that a low thrum as the city expands. And there are stars. You don’t need to see them to know.

Boxes of pastel chocolate candies in pastel boxes glisten in a downtown window. Inside the pastry case, rows of polka-dotted truffles in delicate chevron paper. In the cooler, crested gelato, slices of orange, dollops of cream, rolled wafers curled around hazelnut. Many dozens of busy people file in on their lunch break, talking into cell phones and leafing through daily papers and not having enough time. A child enters with a handful of coins. As she nears the counter, she drops one, and it rolls beneath the cooler. She kneels, fishes clumsily for it. Then she stands, resigning herself to the loss. She counts what remains, then a crowning moment — and she exits into the gray. She makes a game of rolling the remaining coins across the sidewalk.

I always see the same figure on the bus from the corner of my eye. To its credit, it is almost human. Many others board the bus, but they do not see it. Once, defying the space between us — bobbing heads, pulsating arteries of fluorescents, singing metal and groaning rubber and lines of taught pull-cords — I looked directly at it. I do not look directly at it anymore. The city expands. Every day, more stars.

"What will you do when school ends?"

"What do you mean?"

"After exams. After school. What will you do this summer?"

"When have I had trouble keeping busy?" I sneer.

"What will you do without me?"

Your hands were on my back when the sky fell in. I felt the skin break like a prayer. I felt the hot wet air when you sighed the breath you were holding into the crook of my neck. "We have to go." Your hands were on my back when the sky fell in. Your hair was in your face, but I saw your mouth curl with meaning. You didn’t call me by my name then. I didn’t need you to.

The tilt of a head when trying on a cowboy hat, and the dropped-into-the-throat “howdy, partner.” The blistered hand on a joystick. The nail polish applied to the tick on the back of the knee. The back of the knee. The sweat, the airing-out-the-T-shirt hand. The all-night diner off Route 44, with the mountains in the rear rising out of Hudson Valley. The born-again Baptist at the truck stop, leaving pamphlets on the dirt-tracked windshields. The oil-slicked pavement, the opalescence, the neon in the sheen of the parking lot. “I never went on a movie date.” The insistence, the light-brite grin at the marquee as we passed through some little nothing town. They were showing some old porno to the scatter-seated men in trench coats with conspicuously absent hands. “This isn’t what I had in mind,” I whispered to you, and you shushed me while on the screen a man sucked a woman’s chest in a tiled bathroom. “You’re distracting from the plot.” I laughed.

A movie date. You tried, at least. The naughtiness was offset by the smallness of the place. Everything seemed kinder, or kinder for being so empty. Fewer eyes as we made our way upstate. Things were quainter than they had any right to be. I could see so many years unfolding ahead of us on the winding highways up the mountain, like so many popsicle-stained cootie catchers Lisa, the girl with messy-chopped hair and clothes in her backpack and database of numbers in her head, had cracked open to reveal my fortune to me. I was supposed to live to 68, drive a limo, marry an actress, have 13 kids, according to this paper-folded prophecy.

“‘He wouldn’t want me,’” you said into your Coke later while you refilled the tank. T-shirt sweat, hand, wet clumps of hair on my brow. I exhaled a “what?” and blew a clump out of my eye. “What you said before. He wants everyone.” You looked at me, answered my lost silence with a finger pointed up. I looked at the gas station overhang, dotted with sparrows. “Him.” “Oh, that.” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I do.” I was rattled by your sincerity.

“Oh?” I couldn’t think what else.

“We’re his flock.”

“Birds?”

“Sheep.” The tank jolted with fullness, and you re-holstered the pump. “You never…?” You stared. “Nevermind,” into the Coke again, then you crunched it in your fist and tossed it into a can, a sound so hollow I felt it on my ribs.

When we left the next cigarette-warm motel on a Sunday, I told you to take me to a service. Your hands on the wheel, both clasping it from the top. You had those scratches on your knuckles, some redder than others. The car was thick — wet like a fog, and you spoke like you were squinting through it for the words. “I'm tired today.” You didn’t look at me when you said it. “Next time.”

i. i work closing at the video store on the corner of randolph and park. i shelve returns in the back room at the end of the day. i listen to my headphones. a small window splashes yellow headlights against the wall, bathes the linoleum in dusky twilight. i don't do it for the money. i do it so i don't have to answer questions.

ii. there is a gray locker at the end of the hall, across from the cafeteria. i don't think about it. inside are cutouts from home decor magazines and red starbursts in a metal tin. i don't think about it. sometimes you're there. sometimes i'm there too.

iii. my youth group meets on wednesdays. we have a silent prayer at the beginning, and we close our eyes. then we talk about bible stories and local politics. i look at a glossy poster of a horseback rider during youth group. the other kids press their lips together when they smile at me. i like the prayer best, but mine isn't always to god.

iv. our lockers have metal slats at the top, so the air can circulate. but other things fit through the slats too. flowers, letters. red starbursts.

v. i'm re-shelving the day's last return when yellow headlights fall across the wall. something blue shimmers through the middle, skitters into the open closet. i cast my gaze into the black. a blue crescent wobbles into shape. it gleams like a knife. like a smile. i flatten against the wall and flick on the fluorescents.

vi. i watch you toss your pom-poms into orbit at halftime; a handmade eclipse. sunnyside, we're strangers. in the dark, i flatten against the grass and close my eyes. stars wink through the slats in the metal bleachers. you wear boxers under your skirt, but no one would know it.

vii. this time, i sit cross-legged on the tile in the back room and wait. headlights. blue shimmer. i face the light in the closet. it pulses softly. then it blazes bigger, bluer, flares impossibly white-bright and shatters in an instant. my phone buzzes. i toss my key behind the desk and bolt through the parking lot.

viii. i'm perched on the edge of the motel bed, turning the little machine over in my hands. you're lounging behind me in tear-streaked foundation and smudged red lipstick. "i've never used one of these before." your chest presses to my back, arms encircling mine. "slide your thumb. and press." a flame blooms in my hand, but the only heat is your breath on my ear. "you don't need the lighter to do it."

ix. i awake to a car horn and yellow headlights on the wall. i sit up and look to the closet, anticipating blue light cut to ribbons by the wooden slats. nothing. black. i close my eyes. i lie down and roll onto my side, laying an arm across your waist. you turn to face me. your eyes open, gleaming blue. you smile.

As a child, I would spend my Saturday mornings pruning an elderly neighbor's garden. Her home was full of hanging ferns, china dishes, newspaper clippings in crooked scarlet frames, stacks of cassettes and VHS tapes with cryptic handwritten descriptions in Sharpie on their sleeves. Sometimes, when the stars aligned, she would invite me to stay for dinner, and we'd feed sliced bread to a family of raccoons that came to her porch each night at precisely 9:00. Then we would relax in her living room. We’d listen to scratched Julie London albums while her schnauzer, who looked at me like he harbored some secret knowledge about my fate, worshiped at her feet. Once, clasping a mug of decaf Earl Grey between her palms, she told me about a famous world traveler who would cry if he stepped on an ant. "There is nothing too small to be sacred," she murmured as the steam threaded between her twinkling eyes. From that day on, that explorer was my touchstone of empathy. I still scan my path for ants.

𓂅

After her first breakup, my best friend spent three weeks straight watching The Princess Diaries on repeat. After school, she would promptly proceed to her room, shut her door, flip open her laptop, and pop the DVD in. On weekends, she wouldn't even leave the house. We would often lie side by side, watching and quoting the movie together. "My expectation in life is to be invisible, and I’m good at it." We felt as if we too were seated at that wrought iron table, sipping tea from porcelain cups. We both wanted to be the woman at the end of the movie, made beautiful by some benevolent, hair product-wielding sage. But no one, let alone Julie Andrews, was knocking at our doors to tell us we were royal by blood. I became intimately acquainted with the warm space between our shoulders, and the sound of her throat tightening as she rehashed the last days of her relationship aloud. At the end of the third week, I persuaded her to walk with me to a nearby park, where we sat on a swing seat eating cucumber sandwiches (a snack perhaps befitting a Genovian queen). She turned to me, and the sun was tracing the side of her face. "Y'know, I actually prefer Mia's before hair."

𓂅

I stand opposite a brick wall, holding a frosted glass cup. I turn it over in my hands, admiring the delicate gold band around the rim. This might have been my cup once. I can't remember. I loop my finger around the handle and hurl it across the room. There is the radiant forward momentum of one moment accelerating into another. There is the sun slicing into a thousand thin lines. I kneel to pick up the pieces, needing to feel their weight. Remembering, I take them into my hands. They leave cuts on my fingers. Blood runs the length of the lines of my palms. This cup held tea once. This cup was warm once. This is still a cup. This can be a cup again. This is still a cup. This can be a cup again. This is still a cup. This can be a cup again. This is still a cup.

𓂅

Someday, we'll stand in your kitchen, stirring confetti cupcake batter with a wooden spoon. You'll be pressed against my back, your hand on mine a parenthetical. We'll ladle the batter into shiny baking cups. (I'll take special care to pool them evenly, crouching to inspect them at eye level. You'll chuckle at me, and it won't be at my expense. Later, I'll wish I had looked at you then.) We’ll fill most of the cups, and we’ll have the same idea at the same time. We'll abandon our posts to fling handfuls of batter at each other, ducking one another's barrages unsuccessfully. We'll laugh, and we'll wheeze our battle cries, and we won’t be able to stop laughing. You'll kiss a messy laugh into my mouth, and I'll kiss you back, layering our sugar-grained lips. You'll drape your mother’s navy quilt over the living room table, and we'll tell stories with flashlights. We'll drink herbal tea from soup bowls, our faces shimmering. We'll speculate about the shadows on the lawn. We'll name the unnamed things. We'll wash the dishes. We'll put them back on their shelves for another day.

you knew it was a bad idea, but you did it anyway. you mounted your ford bronco, your aptly empty-bellied steed, and took off for the highway. quixote from the concrete. no out of office message, no designated house sitter, no forwarding address, only your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road, your tongue in your mouth, achingly restless, and also achingly heavy. one long line. one long rolling thread. days ahead. and you.

you, and "JESUS SAVES," and "GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS," you and cigarette smokers unfurling themselves outside the quick stops, you and sign spinners, child prophets, holy rollers, women in curlers palming styrofoam coffee cups, stifling yawns behind acrylics. roller rinks on the brink of foreclosure. real estate moguls, "world famous hoagies!," wind mills shrugging on mini golf courses. state flags — one, two, three, four, five — and dawns and dusks passed through your windshield. at night, you stared back into the high beams that used to stiffen your spine and wondered if regret, like courage, is a kind of madness. when you burrowed into your small, halting deaths in new motels, with new neighbors to rattle new bedside reading lamps, it was a kind of corroboration: thumping without, thumping within. and you eyed the luminous place on the curtains where anywhere america always bleeds the same red, open 24 hours, come, huddled masses, come, wretched refuse, come in and commune.

and now, here you are. it's been 20 minutes since you pulled off onto the shoulder and hurled your guts into a cactus. 20 minutes since you crouched in the ruddy, wind-sifted dirt, looped your arms around your knees, hugged tight to your chest, sent forth a small prayer into the endless sky as it roiled with yet-unseen great grey stairwells of cloud cover: give me the words. please, give me the words. 20 minutes since the air exploded, since the air split with a gasping whoosh like a vacuum, all life pouring through a pinprick to fill the stillness (or was that your own throat opening?). then all wet heat, all rain slapping the flat earth, and your tears too, you realized, tasting salt at the corners of your lips. it's been 20 minutes since you were in the middle of the arizona desert, alone, and the rain finally fell, and you finally cried.

20 minutes. you still have 20 more to go.

I always think I'm cresting the story, and then the tide sends me out again, and I realize I've hardly left the shore. I think I'm peering down into the ocean, and then I find I've been looking up at the sky. Which is to say it's all relative. It could be the ocean, maybe, if I let it. I mean, blue is blue. Even if I knew cerulean from sapphire, I think I'd stick to my guns. I've spent a lot of time practicing partiality, because you have to drop an anchor somewhere. The world is always spinning out ahead, more world, more ocean, more life, more sky. Have you ever seen rain on the beach? Like that; the way the veil drops, skyline bleeding out, smearing the vision all gray, curtain drawing down against the waves — or up. Again, relative. Maybe it's not an anchor, but a balloon. See? I'm doing it again. I wish you'd come by and put your feet up and tell me all the places you marked off on the map you made when we were kids playing pirates, and everything fit in a fenced-in patch of grass. Tell me you've sailed the world and run the numbers. Tell me there's nothing new under the sun, nothing we didn’t drench in rocket pop dew and Elmer's glue and chlorine sweat, and big lies about little things, and joyful noise, and clanging our way into living, clamoring into bigness the way we did before we knew the things that creaked and shuddered in a life, like water-borne boards, how every kind of pain has paved the places past the fence. There are so many sunken soldiers. Please. I miss you. I miss you in a little box in my throat. If you cranked the lever and cracked the lid, I'd play a tinny Hushabye Mountain and pour out all the fish and whales and deep sea creatures from behind my eyes, and then I'd be at the bottom of the ocean and finally know for sure. Because I guess I'd drown. Or I'd hold my breath for a very long time — I'm stubborn. Like I said: I've been practicing. Anyway, I've decided I have my back to the sand. Send up a flare. When you remind me how we made gods of the garden gnomes, I'll make the past the unfurling horizon, and we'll count the beginnings and tie them end-to-end and make a patchwork quilt sail of the whole goddamn thing, and the night winds will sigh, and we'll cross over into what has come before and make it new. Make it the story. Make it forward motion. You bring the map. I'll chart the course. We'll ride.

Update 7.31.25: This piece has been edited from its original version. It now incorporates elements of '“The Unrelenting Lightness of Childhood,” which is also available to read on this page.

//

You are God.

That’s how this story goes.

You are God.

You don’t know why anyone calls you good. You would not, per se, describe yourself as good. You have never tried to be good. You have never tried to be anything. Goodness is a wafer. Goodness cannot withstand the world. You are not sure anything can withstand the world — no one but you has survived it yet, after all — but that is another matter.

You are God, and everything has been so much lately. For so long, it was so quiet, with so little company, and now it is so loud. Desire used to be the size of a downpour in a drought, or an early spring. Desire used to take the shape of bushels of sweet berries, noiseless footfalls, sheltering caves, survivable wounds. Desire is so much wider now, and it wafts like mist. You wonder if desire has surpassed you.

You are God, and you were once very small. It’s true. You had a small, quiet life, and you were alone, and the phone never rang. For a long time, you did not know you were alone. You did not even know that you existed. For a long time, it was just you in a dark dark room with TV static and always lukewarm tea, being without knowing, seeing without seeing.

Then, one day, there it was. At first, a winking pinprick, so coy as to be almost undetectable in the void. Then it blinked, stretched, yawned into a dagger of light — LIGHT — no longer glinting, but at once tearing through, full-throated, peeling back the wallpaper of your dark dark room, revealing ecstatic singing color beneath, and you realized that the dark was not a flat thing, but something rich and brimming with possibility. And then, in a matter of moments, the dagger sheathed itself in the ether and was gone again, leaving the faintest wisp of smoke in its wake.

You laughed, cracking the pristine silence. You startled. You laughed again. You knew it was you laughing by the way everything suddenly vibrated, and warmed, but only inside of you, and not, as you realized, pressing a hand to it, outside of you, on the kitchen table, which was cold and still as ever.

Still. Cold. Hand. You held it, trembling, in your other hand, which startled you further, seeing as there were two of them, possibly more.

You could hear. You could feel. And you could see.

You sat ramrod straight, thinking of the light.

And as you sat, you… waited. You, for the first time, found yourself waiting. You had always simply been, you and time, in perfect lockstep, neither once outpacing the other. And now, after some ten zillion years of painless being, you found yourself scraping through 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes of excruciating… waiting.

This is, you know, how the up and the down and all the in-between bits came to be. Yes. Before it ever damned a mortal thing, you were the first to ever feel it: desire.

Approximately ten zillion and seven years from this moment, a gaggle of children will romp through a forest at the end of the cul-de-sac that separates their neighborhood from the next. Sunlight will wink overhead, filtering through leaves that press their palms into the sky. They will dig their fingers into the clay at the bottom of a stream and cup their hands under the water, rippling like a fever, imagining the pebbled earth as piles of little gold coins. They will think of the weeping willows and bamboo thickets as penthouse apartments. They will see, in the divots of the soil-clasping roots of overturned trees, the slots of mailboxes and keyholes. 

The hills that rise before them will be godfaced. The children will make a half-religion of a long-dead lightning-struck tree. Even in their own godhood, they will yield their power to some imagined worthier thing.

They will spend hours in this forest, constructing an elaborate mythos which, maybe already anticipating the flattening force of language, they will commit only to memory, never to writing. How to begin to pill-file their own sacred vastness into an alphabet? Vastness will be, for them, at this moment, exactly the point. The point will be standing in one spot and looking up and spinning on their feet with their arms wide, plunging themselves into the universe. The point will be ceilingless-ness. The point will be ever-expanding hypotheticals.

And then, at the end of the day, they will be called home to their families’ kitchen tables, and there will be names in the calls, and the names will be the children’s names, making them into permanent things spinning them into ever-tighter circles.

Before you were called God, you did not have a name. You never chose to have a name. The children at the kitchen tables will eat dinner and shuffle off to bed, and one day they will kill each other defending the name they have heard is yours, the name which you never chose. More godhoods will emerge out of more playgrounds, in the time of vastness before truths become fixed. And more forests will grid over with permanence, burying bodies.

Yes. Before it ever damned a mortal thing, you were the first to feel it: desire.

In waiting for the light to return, you were defined by its absence, which is what desire is. A hole for a name, a name which becomes yours. A hole for a grave. 

Eventually, you tired of waiting for the light to return. You made your own. It was never quite as brilliant. You wondered if the light you saw had ever existed. It began to dawn on you, gradually, that perhaps it hadn’t, and you had only ever imagined something new. You had been alone, but now you were not, yet even in the company of your creation, you were left with your desire.

Yes, you are God, and you desire, and you are the origin of desire. And now, you ache.

A man walks down the sidewalk. He has forgotten something important, from many years ago. It has been so many years, in fact, that he cannot even remember that something has been forgotten.

Exactly fourteen things have to happen before he can remember what he has forgotten, and thirteen have already happened. The fourteen things are as follows, and in this order: He had to make the big move he had been dreading (one). He had to make a promise twice (two, three), and break a promise once (four). He had to get married (five). He had to get divorced (six). He had to apologize sincerely and without a trace of selfishness (seven). He had to adopt a dog (eight).

These were the broader contours of his life, but there were other things too, singularities that added weight and texture and were of equal, if not greater significance. He had to fly to Pittsburgh on business, and wave down a taxi outside of the airport, so that a curly-haired woman in the intervening space would mistakenly receive the gesture and wave back (nine), and he had to be so charmed by this that he would ask her out for a drink (ten), and over drinks, he had to meet her gaze with a tenderness that would inspire something fizzy and bright in her, and compel her to ask him out for coffee the next week (eleven). He had to learn to make a proper poulet à la moambé, simmering chicken, hot chili, garlic, tomato, salt, pepper, okra, and palm butter over a well-loved stove, so that her parents would beam and clap appreciatively (twelve), even though he had slightly overcooked the chicken. He had to park his 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee along the edge of a small beach, and lie beside her on the sand looking up at the stars while Ricky Skaggs’s Don’t Cheat In Our Hometown warbled over the stereo (thirteen).

These things had to happen before he could remember what he has forgotten. And now, the fourteenth quickly approaches.

He walks down the sidewalk. She walks with him, curls bouncing, and the dog walks with them too. He watches a bird flit from tree to tree. It’s May, and the leaves ripple with applause and look like water. He thinks of the ocean, and the beach, and the dawn breaking in pink streaks over the water. He thinks about their morning walk, and how the dog had lapped at the edges of the foamy sea, leaping back when the water rolled in and snapping her jaws at the ghost crabs that bubbled in small holes along the shore. He thinks about dogs, and how they have a funny way of always seeming a part of something greater, about how all things conspire to play with them. He thinks about people, and how they are like that in their youth, and then they learn better, and things do not orbit around them the same way anymore. And then, all at once, he sees the life he has lived laid out before him in his mind’s eye, like many dashes of color coalescing into a larger shape. And something in him lights up like a firecracker, and his eyes grow wide and bright, and he doubles over laughing and stays that way, doubled over, clutching his chest and heaving with laughter for several minutes, happy tears streaming down his face.

"What?" she asks several times, with some alarm. "What is it?"

The dog barks and wags her tail, hesitantly.

Finally, he stands upright again, wiping the tears from his eyes and feeling that a great weight has been lifted.

"What is it?" she asks again.

He smiles, opens his mouth to speak, and stops. He furrows his brow. He opens his mouth again.

"I… I can’t remember," he says. "I’m sure it wasn’t important."

She searches his face for a moment, bemused. "I’m sure it’ll come to you later."

The first hot day. The thrill of the run. The thrill of the knowing. Pad, pad, pad, hot heels on pavement, picking up the little flecks of rock, settling over the warm gummy grooves, the leap. The air. Being in the air, being the one in the air, being in the air where people aren’t. You’re not supposed to be in the air. You’re not supposed to be in the air, but you’re in the air, and you’re grinning hard. You’re grinning, and your feet are slicing into the chill, burrowing into the hollow so the water blooms up around your calves, all arc, all blanketing transformation. The kick of the chlorine. The spritz. Sniffing the wet air, remembering at the last second you’re going under, just time for one quick sip, you could’ve gulped, it’s too late now, a sip will do, then whining chatter to one big glug. All the world a rippling murmur, little brushes of sound. The lightness at your roots. The clustering exhale. The rising. The breath.

There is a forest opposite my childhood home. It ran the length of our cul-de-sac, separating our street from the next neighborhood over. My sister and the handful of other children who lived on the street spent hours in the forest every day. I think of how my life was somehow more real to me then, when the hills were godfaced and the streams were littered with little gold coins, if only you dug your fingers into the clay and cupped them while the water rippled before you like hot desire. I think of the lavish penthouse apartments we imagined out of the forests of weeping willows and bamboo stalks. I think of the mailboxes and keyholes we saw in the slots and divots in the soil-clasping roots of overturned trees. I think of the long-dead lightning-struck tree we made a half-religion of; even in our own godhood, we yielded our power to some imagined worthier thing.

We spent hours in this forest, constructing an elaborate mythos which was committed only to memory, never to writing. Maybe already we feared the containment of language — how to begin to pill-file this sacred vastness into an alphabet? Vastness was exactly the point. The point was standing in one spot and looking up and plunging yourself into the universe and spinning on your feet with your arms wide. The point was a gust of wind whisking the last dandelion seed out of sight. The point was ceilingless-ness. The point was ever-expanding hypotheticals. To name something is to hold it in place. We named the nameless things, yes, but with a wink. We were all in on the joke. We knew who the free things were. At the end of each day, we would be called home to dinner, and there would be names in the calls, and they would be our names, making us into permanent things spinning ourselves into tighter and tighter circles.

I think of how my life was more real to me then, before I built walls around my name, before I gridded over the open fields of what I imagined myself to be. Some things must go. This is how stories get told — we leave things out. We narrow the window of possibility. There are still dandelions in the sidewalk, but it is mostly pavement.

In a yoga class, I forward fold chest over knees, and other increasingly specific human beings fold too, grasping their elbows. They look like bats tucking into themselves to sleep, and I feel a searing pang of affection for everyone in this room, unwittingly playing a role in my private moment of whimsy. A fan turns idly on the ceiling, and I think of a game my sister and I played as children, shuffling around the house on all fours and peering between our legs, imagining floor as ceiling, ceiling as floor, and ourselves as weightless nimble things.

Something in me remains unconvinced that this was a trick of the imagination and not a real act of magic. We were so bare and open — who’s to say we couldn’t defy the laws of gravity? What adult really knows what childhood makes possible? We felt that at any moment we could take flight, soar through an open window, out into the upside-down world, skating our toes along the tips of trees and lifting our chins to collect cloud hats like wisps of meringue. Upward, outward, skyward — anywhere. We believed our bodies capable of anything then, even unrelenting lightness.

I think of lying in the forest under the sky and feeling myself thrust into that middle space, soaring lightyears beyond the sweat-wet summers of my youth. There is a time, before we become boundaried people, when there is no performance because we haven’t yet learned our part. It is so far from me now that it is less like a memory and more like a glint of light, a sun-wink down through the leaves. I know it to be true by its warmth. There is a moment before we are asked to decide ourselves into existence when we are as much of the earth as of the air. There is a moment when we manage to outrun our own names.

If only I could have captured that weightless feeling, pumped it into a balloon, swallowed it like a second heart. I would like to have both versions of me at once — the me I am, and the weightless me I might have been back then. Both exist in relation to cruelty; one in spite of yes, the other because of no. Both of these selves existing together, simultaneously, like an image rendered in 3D, bleeding red on one side and blue on the other. In this reality, they look out for each other. They wake early on weekends and sip tea cross-legged on the sofa. They split a pomegranate. They know all possible futures and all possible pasts and so they do not think of them, but instead only of the sweet red juice smeared on each other’s lips, each leaning forward to swipe it gently clean with a tongue-dabbed thumb.

Turn left at the mailbox. You’ll pass the pond with the kayak beached on the grass, then the house with the neon Budweiser sign in the living room, then the house with the cabinets and dressers waiting for pickup on the curb, then the house where you babysat and saw the porn in the family computer history. Go left around the bend of the tall white fence with the roof billowing out overtop (some places have no right not to be haunted). Play frogger to the tennis courts. Pick up a ball and dribble it down the sidewalk, hoping you look like a boy in a movie. You’ll pass the house with the long front yard and the abandoned swimming pool growing ferns out back. Turn right at the fenced-in plot where the dog always barks, go past the house with the rusting car out front, past the school with the baseball field where the man drags his heel in the sand at night, past the window that’s always green. Pass the house where you saw the sleeping family of deer and startled them awake and felt bad about it and still do. Pass the house where you righted the inflatable snowman, all the houses with their Christmas lights still up. Pass the little library that only has Christian books, so you don’t bother stopping anymore. Pass the house with the puddle like a pond out front, and the one under construction, threatening legal action against trespassers (and you’d like to push your luck but know you won’t). Come upon the abandoned house you were too afraid to go inside that’s painted over and boarded up now. The knob turned once, but it doesn’t anymore. The mirror that lived slanted against the side is gone too, and now there’s always a rabbit in the front yard. You’ll wonder about ghosts. You’ll turn at the arcing driveway and pass the synagogue and the intersection that’s always blinking and the church with the lit-up stained glass and locked doors. You’ll wonder if you’ll always feel this way. You’ll run like you have somewhere to be. You’ll pass the house that looks like it would be your boy best friend’s in a movie. You’ll cross the bridge, hoping you look like a boy in a movie. You’ll see the fire station and the tennis courts and the billowing roof. You’ll think of boyhood. You’ll feel alone and beautiful and beautiful for being alone. You’ll think of the rabbits in the fog, the sleeping deer. You’ll think of the placelessness of grief. You ought to be in bed, you know. You ought to be in bed.

I want to write about something that is not beautiful, but I tend toward glamorization. I am never lovelier than when I emerge from the bathroom stall, tear-streaked and dripping with the unknowable depths of my boring, predictable hurt, to face my reflection, the fluorescents that map my pain angles like stained glass (and isn’t it funny how small and undisturbed the surrounding room is? How can I stand it?). The me emerged from the stall is made lovelier by the necessity of immediate composure. The agility of the hairpin turn, the athleticism of social mores — oh, to undersell it to a stranger, that they might think what a brave face I’m putting on and ogle my humility.

There is a welcome plausible deniability in the bathroom cry; it suggests a lack of agency. Masochism makes a great deodorant. I wish I weren’t so enamored by the image of my own choicelessness, but please point me in the direction of the atheists who have inoculated themselves against Puritanical angst. All stories, including the Jesus ones and my own small implosions, widen into other stories, which is why I get so dizzy standing still. If you ask me, all inciting incidents ought to stay put and quit running up to the corner store. I’m serious. We’ve got too many plots with their feet pounding the pavement. I am always looking for the edges of the narrative, and when I find them, I may win a special prize from the person who decides which fictions are true, who is not God or Jesus, but a gently nodding sort of someone who might buy me a drink and let me lie down for a few short years. The point is, I keep losing my place in the book as the pages rearrange themselves, and now I barely know what words are.

Bathroom. Heartache. Mirror. Bathache. Heartroom.

Does the story start with the cry-worthy thing, or does it start in the bathroom? I wasn’t writing poetry two months ago.

YOU AWAKE IN A DARK ROOM. DO YOU:

A) STAY WHERE YOU ARE.

B) FOLLOW THE LENGTH OF THE WALL TO TRY TO FIND THE LIGHT.

YOU CHOSE B. YOU FOLLOW THE LENGTH OF THE WALL. THERE IS A WHISPERED LAUGH SOMEWHERE BEYOND IT. YOU BEGIN TO SENSE THAT YOU HAVE BEEN ASLEEP FOR A VERY LONG TIME. DO YOU:

A) TRY TO FORGET.

B) TRY TO REMEMBER.

YOU CHOSE B. YOU TRY TO REMEMBER. IT COMES IN FLICKERS. LIGHT, ONCE. AND A VOICE YOU KNEW. YOU COME TO A SPLIT PASSAGE. TO YOUR LEFT, YOU SEE A SLIVER OF LIGHT, AND HEAR CARS HUFFING, BIRDS CHIRPING, PEDESTRIAN FOOTFALLS. TO YOUR RIGHT, YOU SEE DARKNESS, AND HEAR A FAINT VOICE. DO YOU GO:

A) LEFT.

B) RIGHT.

YOU CHOSE B. YOU GO RIGHT. YOU FOLLOW THE VOICE. YOU KNOW THE VOICE. SOMEWHERE, THE WHISPERED LAUGH. EVERYWHERE, DARKNESS. IT’S SO DARK, AND YOU REMEMBER SO MUCH. DO YOU WANT TO TURN BACK?

A) YES.

B) NO.

YOU’RE STILL DECIDING WHEN, SUDDENLY — A SLICK BLOW AND A CRY. YOU FEEL FOR A HANDLE AND TURN IT. YOU WERE ASLEEP TOO LONG, AND YOU TOOK TOO LONG TO DECIDE, AND YOU ARRIVED TOO LATE. YOU ARE IN A DARK ROOM, AND HE IS BLEEDING OUT. DO YOU:

A) HOLD HIM AND CRY.

B) HOLD HIM AND DO NOT CRY.

...

NO, THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS. THOSE ARE YOUR OPTIONS. CHOOSE NOW.

...

I DON’T KNOW WHY YOU’RE UPSET. YOU KNEW WHAT YOU WERE GETTING INTO.

...

YES, IT’S VERY SAD. I’M SORRY. THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO.

...

WELL, WHAT DID YOU EXPECT? YOU ARE IN A HORROR STORY. IT SAYS IT RIGHT THERE AT THE TOP. THIS IS A HORROR STORY. THIS IS HOW THE HORROR STORY ENDS.

...

OKAY, FINE. THERE IS ONE THING WE CAN TRY.

LET’S GO BACK.

...

...

...

YOU ARE VERY YOUNG. YOU DO NOT KNOW YET THAT THINGS CAN DIE. YOU KNOW THAT FIGHTERS IN VIDEO GAMES CAN DIE, AND THAT WORMS DRY UP ON THE SIDEWALK AFTER IT RAINS. YOU KNOW THAT SPRING LEADS TO SUMMER, AN INFINITE LOVEBREATH, ALL TECHNICOLOR SUNRISE AND CUT-GRASS HUM. YOU KNOW THAT HE IS VERY BEAUTIFUL. BUT YOU DO NOT KNOW YET THAT THINGS — REAL, BEAUTIFUL THINGS — CAN DIE. HE IS BESIDE YOU LAUGHING WITH THAT VOICE YOU KNOW, AND HE SEEMS INFINITE.

YOU ASK HIM TO RUN AWAY WITH YOU.

HE SAYS YES.

YOU DRIVE FOR WEEKS.

YOU STOP AT THE MOTELS OFF THE INTERSTATE.

YOU TAKE TURNS PAYING FOR GAS.

HE SMOKES YOU AT POOL.

HE READS YOU THE OBITS.

YOU READ HIM THE MISSED CONNECTIONS.

YOU DRINK LOTS OF BAD COFFEE.

YOU TAKE SMILING PICTURES AT LANDMARKS ON A DISPOSABLE KODAK.

YOU MAKE HIM STRAWBERRY PANCAKES ON HIS BIRTHDAY.

YOU SET OFF CHEAP FIREWORKS IN A GRAVEL LOT, AND YOU GUIDE HIS FINGERS ON THE ZIPPO.

YOU LAY A FOOT APART IN THE TRUCK BED AT DRIVE-INS, THEN INCHES, THEN NOTHING.

ONE NIGHT, YOU GET SOAKED IN THE RAIN AT A 7-ELEVEN, AND YOU STRIP OFF YOUR WET HOODIES IN FRONT OF THE SPACE HEATER, AND HE KISSES YOU IN THE LIGHT OF THE TV.

YOU GET MARRIED. YOU LIVE LONG LIVES. YOU SAVE THE WORMS ON THE SIDEWALK. YOU BUY A HOUSE WITH NO DARK ROOMS. YOU HOLD EACH OTHER, AND NO ONE BLEEDS OUT.

...

IT’S A BEAUTIFUL STORY, BUT IT ISN’T TRUE.

I MEAN, IT MIGHT BE TRUE SOMEWHERE, BUT IT ISN’T TRUE HERE.

...

ISN’T THAT ENOUGH? THAT IT MIGHT BE TRUE SOMEWHERE?

DOESN’T THAT MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER?

...

I KNOW. YOU’D LIKE TO BE IN THE OTHER STORY.

...

WELL, IT’S NOT ABOUT FAIR. YOU CAN’T HAVE EVERY STORY, YOU KNOW. SOME PEOPLE HAVE TO BE IN THE HORROR STORIES. SOME PEOPLE HAVE TO BE THE ONES BLEEDING OUT, AND SOME PEOPLE HAVE TO BE THE ONES HOLDING THEM.

...

I’LL ASK AGAIN.

...

YOU ARE IN A DARK ROOM, AND HE IS BLEEDING OUT. DO YOU:

A) HOLD HIM AND CRY.

B) HOLD HIM AND DO NOT CRY.

...

YOU HAVE TO PICK ONE.

...

FINE.

...

I’LL GIVE YOU ONE MORE OPTION.

...

C) HOLD HIM FOR AS LONG AS YOU CAN. FORGET THE OTHER STORY. FORGET YOU WERE EVER HERE. GO BACK TO SLEEP.

...

...

...

THANK YOU.

...

I’M SORRY AGAIN.

...

YOU CHOSE C. YOU WAKE UP IN YOUR BED. THE SUN IS UP. YOU SLEPT ALRIGHT. YOU TURN ON THE TV. YOU MIGHT HAVE A NAP LATER.

I fell off my bike last summer and scraped my knee up. I fell off my bike because I was distracted by a girl with a puppy on roller skates. The girl was wearing the roller skates. Not the puppy. Had the puppy been on roller skates, I would have fallen twice as hard. No, the girl was on roller skates, so I got distracted, and fell off my bike, and I still have the scar on my knee. Later, I took up roller skating, and I fell doing that too, and scraped up my hand. Both those scrapes are on the right side of my body. I wonder what that says. Things always say something. We do things on purpose on accident, or else we decide we did anyway. My right side is my dominant side, so maybe it’s my body rebelling against this state of affairs, Nabokov style. Down with the ruling class, which is the right side of my body. Or maybe it’s a reminder of my own agency, a sort of tap-tap on the shoulder, hey, remember your power. It’s just terrible, isn’t it? how one thing can just as easily mean its opposite. Most truths are closer to their opposites than they are to any adjacent truths, which leads to a lot of upset in the truth community.

But, refreshingly, the scars themselves are facts. They are the pavement saying I was here, like writing HAGS in a yearbook. You and I were once in the same place, against all possible odds. Here is the third party who bore witness.

It’s well past summer, and the knee scar is sticking around. The hand scar is fresh, and still within the threshold of what could reasonably be called a wound (truth v. untruth). The skin around it is frayed, like how old letters are burned along their edges, because history is all fire. It will likely heal over fine, it just looks a little raw, and needs another layer of skin — who doesn’t?

I think it’s delightful the way the body handles these matters on its own. I don’t have to dole out responsibilities to the scrape-fixing committee. One day the knee scrape is red dashes, then it’s a scab, then it’s a little rose kiss. One evening a woman is nodding off on the L train, then she’s sleeping on a stranger’s shoulder and he’s gently nudging her at her stop. Holding doors. Hailing cabs. The kindnesses of the world that answer silent calls. How crucial that we can desire each other’s healing.

This is a poem. It has no new insights to share. It is everything you already knew. It does not uplift new questions or ideas. It is deeply unimpressive. It is entirely mundane. It does not demonstrate its author’s brilliance. It is a plain friend who is polite to your parents and not inclined toward the highbrow. It likes Mission: Impossible and Chili’s. It does not feel strongly in any particular direction. It wears khakis. It does not go to fancy gallery openings or drink martinis. It has never heard of Dimes Square. Every night, it goes to bed and enjoys a restful, dreamless sleep, and every morning, it rises refreshed and blank.