yesnothankyou

She says, "Wake up, it's time to go."

My eyes adjust to the sun and I'm in someone else's bed. I called him a friend but I don't know what he was, that word isn't so precise. He was kind enough to take the floor and now he's sitting with his knees up. Knuckles pressed to his cheekbone, a series of minor changes in expression that I can't pick out well enough because I'm focused on the ringing in my ears. Like fingertips tracing a crystal cup. Anything else is for me to contextualize later when I'm looking for evidence.

(Like this: You push me and I shove you back in a mostly empty parking lot. You provoked me and I was half-drunk off the feeling, smiling inadvertently. Gathering momentum, a tether snaps, and the flash is the only thing that could call me closer to whatever. The stars are leering and I can't shut up, you can't stop me. Every time you speak it sounds like a ricochet. You're that snake we saw beneath the oak tree, you're the supercell lightning we saw from the french door, cloud-to-ground. It's appealing. Cup my hands and catch fused glass, tell me thank you. This is a deconstruction. This is holy, opulent and neon.)

It's night again. We're on a patio, sticky in humidity. Smells like June and citronella. Their eyes fixed on a far-off bonfire but I'm tracking hand movements. She points to a crawling satellite and I'm a quick co-conspirator. I love her like something scenic, a thing to take in, it's the only way I could. I'm out of options. I don't know what she wants from me and I'm too busy to give it the right consideration. The world doesn't cohere for me, has me bent. Sometimes it almost does and I linger there until I wear it down back into nothing, mirrors and highways again, houselights fading. Charting where sounds overlap with actions, my mouth moving in silence, and the math is all wrong. I use my memory to decorate hollow places. Rigged numbers still add up somewhere, don't they? So it's a smile exchanged in a parlor where none of us belonged but especially not me, sideways honesty in an abandoned home on Parker's Chapel Road, laying on the hood of a car in Arizona and needing them to tell me what the moment was for them, the tone Patrick used when he said an otherwise kind sentence on his porch swing. I meant to love everything in words the way I didn't know how to outside of them. Still not sure if that's what I actually did.

Someone pulls my ear because I'm not paying attention. They're trying to come up with a new game to play. Like a joke, she tells me, "Let's close our eyes and forget our whole lives, like everything. Do you swear you'll do it?" I swore whatever she wanted me to. Four crescents in the heel of my palm, the teeth of mountains, the fat magnolias in the backyard I grew up in, a junk store full of tin and fabrics so indigo I thought I'd never know another color. I swear on each, who cares, how much worse or better can it get? I didn't want to fix her, anyway. I wanted to be another ruined thing. Skyscraper into a god, delirious, endings don't get to pull at my shirtsleeves if I haunt them first. I thought I was all of it. I was just a stranger.