Then, he just laid there with the hazy rain and the cars pounding through it and thought. How silly, he thought. To long for someone you don't even know. How quickly the independence he'd been building had left the scene, to let the crime of her take hold. His mind fell into that wide hole of her temporary absence and laid there as an anchor of stone. Her words were hardly a bed, but he would treat them no other way. Because some masochistic part of him preferred thinking warmer to feeling it. Because he knew she was feeling warmer now instead of just wishing it. Somehow the cold isn't so cold when your own kindness is a replacement for invisible blasts of ice.
It was the risk of death that sustained his new reason for living. And if he could just fend off the hounds of cynicism for one more day, maybe the angel of hope would come to visit him. And maybe just once he could look out at faces he didn't know and be okay with their blankness. And the stories that lay directly behind would never be told, but maybe they were a flame not meant for him.
All her stories. The ones she once experienced and led him through the same. They had once been her own fires, but now ash. No warmth in them save the thought itself. It was their masochism taking hold again, using thoughts as heat ventriloquism. No, they had to fight it and learn to make their own fire. To remember that they had arms and hands and they could do more with them than just crawl up together and feed each other decadent fancies. They could make the cold go away if they tried to.

And now, it comes down to these moments before us. 

This mere second that holds our lips apart will soon be over. 

And each one after comes as a drop of the Aeternam.

 Just promise to hold onto me in this rush,
and i promise i'll still be holding on to you when we die.

she put down the rosary and stared out the window at a gray afternoon. Her face was dismal like her heart's fabric. Nothing was tugging on its strings as they used to. Nothing was quite so happy or sad as when she was with her (whoever she'd thought of that day).

Orange, white, red. The colors strewn onto metal and brick. Blank as if they were gray. As if they were painted and stationary. The screens, the window. They were one in the same. She was merging into a world that didn't exist and becoming numb to the real one. But neither could offer what she wanted. That spark that sets her off into who she is. She waited and waited and it didn't come.

"Why are you waiting?" she asked.
"Why are you still like this? You have the spark. Why can't You release it?"

A ruminant tirade under the quilt. Echoes off drywall and the hum of cars. She was suffering the unbearable weight of breathing without a reason and speaking without sound. Cowards choose suicide. The brave ones don't have this kind of problem.

She chose mindfulness. The kind that wraps you in the present and never lets go. That kind that dismantles Rosaries and Gelcaps and AK-47s. The kind that finds simplicity in all life's happenings.

And the gray became the crystalline beams of a rainbow. The hum became intricate parts of a whole. Her feet and hands could move, and all she had to do was tell them to. Even in ugliness, beauty was at some point created. The trick was to discover its hiding places.

Back then, we would count our days together: Seven, Thirty, Three-Hundred and Sixty-Five. And Before we could stop to think, we had become the safe parts of each others' minds that slow down our growing up. You and I. we were Us.

But then you grew out of me, and into the city. And I could feel it in the shortness of your breaths and the quickness of your eyes. How your veins were flooded with carbon, and your skin shrouded with whatever heat it could gather. You were becoming more of a line than a point, a blurred stream of your routines spread thin across the minutes. You were racing to become all of yourself in an impossible time.

I remember missing you in those pendulum swings. You were unfathomably quick, I'll commend you for that. Quicker than life. Quicker than me.  But then one day, you stopped ticking and my world stopped moving. And then the doctors started counting down: One-Sixty, One-Twenty, Eighty, Fifty, Thirty, Twenty, Ten.


And so I simply stopped feeling.


That's how you left me. Do you remember? I guess it's silly to think that you would remember such things.

But anyway, I hope you're doing better now. You deserve it.

how do i know what's real?

Define reality. Then see if it evaporates.

Would that our threads run stale
and boring day begets boring night.
how we fail to reset our head-clocks
til the time is expressed as a blurred sumi-e

You know how boldly our growth revealed
that the sun's angles were waning and waxing.
No longer, were they the snapshots of an eternal reality
that we knew as children

We are twenty-somethings on paper
and nothings, really, on TV.
We are trying too hard to be who we are.
And yet, still not enough.

I know so very little of you
because I know so very little of me.

It was a time I should have been sleeping
when I looked up at Selene keeping her quiet vigil on the earth
marking the hours and minutes til rise
of Amaterasu's jubilant fire.

playing hell's games, I turned myself over
to her cold echoed gamma rays,
the siren calling to bring her warmth.

But should I give her the last match in my book.
I would have no more to give
no backup plan, no safety nets.

So I didn't.
we didn't.          I didn't.

And I keep repeating it to myself,
and turning it over,
hoping I'll learn to accept it.