Flight Risk

I am living in this paradox of normalcy and drinking Club Soda from the mouth of the bottle licking germs from strangers. I'm reading biographies of men I've met in another life; men with such strife and stubborn convictions they bring their own young to their knees. I keep referring to the same random fact: Kangaroos eat their own offspring.

These instances stay with you; the experience doesn't follow you but moves along beside you. While I think of this, I look down and see that my hands are the color of summer rain in a satin base.

I will look back at this point in my life, when I was sleeping just to smell familiarity woven into cotton threads and feel overcome with a tiredness I will never learn to articulate. But by then, no one is asking me to. I'm offering a stuttered explanation to drawn, bored faces.

Those months were a time when strangers remarked that I was what you call a flight risk- only months had gone by and even the post office was having difficulty keeping up with me. In this same time of awakening, I started straightening my hair and using sand paper at a rate that alarmed both my roommates and my landlord. When the dust settled, so did a mess of curls against my shoulders. 

Three Days

They sat around the table with their heads hidden in their hands, almost more embarrassed than sad. The lights were off because the sun had not quite set and a small dog is whimpering in the corner. I feel his pain and his fear with such a force I search for a bruise for the following three days.

Noah

We're sitting around two benches that pass for coffee tables. The lawn furniture is cracking but we've put pillows over the plastic to make everything feel a little more dignified.

My keyboard is covered in teal and green paint. I stopped counting how many times a day I stop to think about what it must feel like to be you. And the calendar has slipped completely away from me. All that I grasped on to before has fallen the way we missed that sunset in mid September.

On the beach, I'm looking towards the horizon while ships pass. The under tow is strong but so am I. I am squinting and in the distance I swear to no one that I see it but as the waves crash and the currents pulls nothing towards me.