part five. (it's been a while.)

dear holy room, dear warning cry, dear unending pink skies,

What if the full moon is just a pinhole? She asks me this, and I am falling through the hardening earth.¹ The frost is coming. My appetite is running. How many days can we continue like this? The mirror shows faces we no longer recognize; we are characters in a play and the hands of the great masters are collapsing us into one another. Stay tuned next for the feeling of a peach pit cracking open.    

Act Three 

The girl who lives on the moon is thinking of you. She does this often. You, however, are not thinking of the girl on the moon. You are walking along a trail in the woods. The path is narrow and the dirt is littered with pebbles, which you frequently trip over. The grass on both sides is tall enough to brush against your knees, the golden blades bobbing lazily as you drift by. Their movement is an echo of your movement; you are a force, you are causal. You realize that this is a trail meant for one. There is no room for another person beside you, there is no way for your pace to match with someone else’s. A stream gurgles somewhere out of sight, sounding nearly identical to your own stomach. A bead of sweat runs down your back; this is perspiration. A bead of sweat runs up your back; this is a bee. Butterflies flutter in lackadaisical spirals. Life is a circular pattern, you do not know where it begins or where it ends.

A door only has two sides, you think.

No, a door has three, the girl who lives on the moon says. This is your moment of great upheaval. This is the conjunction of everything you could be and everything you are not. But you do not hear her. You do not look up from the trail.

Thunder ripples through the grey clouds slowly filling the sky, falling like creases on silk. Dusk is swatches of grey and black. Thick sheets of rain spill down on your windshield, and you can barely see the road in front of you. There is an emptiness slowly leaking from your liver. You imagine it spreading like slick, black oil over water, spreading ever outwards from one point of origin. The girl who lives on the moon allows a single tear to fall from the inner corner of her left eye. The moon completes one full evolution in the time it drips down her cheek, leaving behind a track of salt and sympathy. You turn your car off and sit in silence until the air inside cools.

parts one through four of this story can be found in the archive.  

1 The year is 2023. I’m editing and annotating my old letters in preparation for their rewelcoming to the world.

This is the strongest metaphor for love I ever did come up with.