yesnothankyou

We're in the lake and our mouths are beneath the surface but I know you're smiling anyway. Your eyelashes are wet and someone else jumps into the water and I'm smiling too. I think that was the last time we went there but I'm not entirely sure. It's been too long, all those lifetimes ago. How many lives have we had again? We can reconvene and talk about it later. You take that polaroid of me on the shore after. expired film, black and white. tell me my shoulders are so small, say that you like the way my collarbones make a deep dip. Shadows and contours, grain and noise, ask me if I want to have it. No, you keep it, I think I only look like this for you. Later that night we sit on the stairs waiting for our friends to stop arguing in the room and we're trying not to smile because the fight's real bad but we know they'll get over it soon, they always do. Your hands are folded in your lap, digging into the fabric of your dress, quiet for a moment. You talk about the skirt I'm wearing, say it's pretty and blue. I tell you it's the same one I wore on one of the worst afternoons of my life and when I laugh about that you laugh with me. "Always the color blue for you" yeah, always the color blue for me. A terrible inside joke that we're the only ones who know how to laugh at. I don't tell you anymore about it then, but you ask me later when I'm driving your car, which is always the place for that kind of thing. I tell you even though you almost never tell me anything I want to know about you. That's not right—sometimes you do, but I think it's usually an accident. like every now and then you can't help it, which is strange and fun even if I never understand all the rules. So I talk about how I sat on another set of stairs wearing it, thinking why did I do that? over and over again. At the time, I only wrote about that if it was tucked into something else, always trying to make it less feral. contort it tightly, make it small enough to grow out of. It took me a long time to stop doing that.

Well, let it all be feral, let it all be true. Some things never stop baring their teeth. You know about that, though. and every time you show me, I nod, knowing it's never the whole thing. You're the one who told me that omissions are never a coincidence.

Here's another life, from a time before: Riding in that guy's car who's more your friend than mine, and the streets look like slurs of light punctuated only by whatever can outgun it. Laughing together like we're on a carnival ride, creaky, volatile, all that shock and acceleration. We're drunk in the backseat and you start telling me the ending of secrets I don't have the genesis for. Trying to understand the storm of you, just don't ever know what to make of it, oh well. never know what you call home. never know what you want from all of us, only that we all make you sad sometimes. Broken up, muscle and bone, but a gleaming thing still. what a scene. You take those photos of me but you don't tell me what you're seeing and I never ask you.

none of this is sad for me even though that's how it all sounds. It's funny how that goes sometimes.