I need a resurgence of wit.
I feel sloped and small, but with the sort of Adelaide from Guys and Dolls colored blonde hair that makes me feel as though I’m a bit more alive than I might otherwise be.
Tomorrow is therapy.
I am supposed to have imagined my life with a relationship in it. I have had two months to do this and now on the last night available, I am trying. I am not coming up with much. I feel thick, brick walls of shame and regret and impossibility and I am trying to just walk around them and create the thought exercise. Say, let’s just say those weren’t there. Let’s just say I could have a perfect copy of you that was free and clear of distance, of failure, of the real and necessary features that could possibly give me pause. Tabula rasa. Let’s just saying I knew you were totally up for it and wanted it and it was…there. That thing we will know it when we see it. Let’s say it was.
Life with you would be warm on colder nights. Life would be…you would have stories that I have never heard before. I would have stories that you have never dreamed up. You would want to hear them. Not all at once. Not a cauldron full. But a stream, running past that we can dip our feet in. A fire burning behind the grate that we can warm ourselves by, roast our marshmallows over.
We could go there and find the benefit without having to steal the flame, without having to carve the river. Your hand would find mine.
Settle, settle.
Don’t start leaving that body quite yet. I need it: there’s a laugh I left in its throat that I need returned. There’s a kiss caught in its lips, an embrace lodged in its arms, a love that runs along its spine like a silk ribbon and I can hardly be made to do without any of them.
There, in you, would be a reason to stay on the ground.
Not keep getting driven into the heavens to choke on the dust and the drone of the cherubim praising the angles of light. Not to rise through the aspen leaves, through the ceiling fan and roof tiles, through what remains of the blue ozone hot glued with cirrus and cumulus cotton wafts. There would be a chain on me, no more to wander the ethereal, the astral, the Empyrean as a soul untethered by commitment. By sanity, perhaps.
I would know the earth as I have never known it before, as one who belonged to it, was safe to walk its paths.
I could be in one place at a time rather than three. My third eye could see just the hand on the hem, the bird on the wire singing sweetly, the day as it is without rising above it.
The evocation is hemlock. I’m drinking it down, though, in the hopes that this plan, this dark ichor of hope sitting in my belly, spilling from my brain, is enough ballast to sink within reach.
