Oh My

I

Sigh

And say

It's

A

Fine Day.

Light The Lanterns

"I hate the way you smoke."

He exhaled, took a drag, and held it in his lungs. He always saw the smoke as water, rising up a column in laminar flow. If he didn't smoke the way he smoked, he didn't see it, and it didn't feel like smoking.

"Yeah, well. You smoke like a girl."

"....I am a girl."

"....So you are."

He blew out a string of smoke, and felt the wind's fingers push at his hair.

"I like your hair."

"Thank you. I thought you would."

"Hmm."

And so they stood there, staring at each other's feet, listening to the lock stream by, as the sunset turned the water a deeper shade of purple with every passing degree.

Arson

A thousand silences will not scrub you clean.

Toss your husks on for the roast.

When your house burns down to your ankles,

You will find a pail of water,

and think first of your thirst

and cinders will sink to the ocean floor.

This Perpetual Journey

She has a thing for losing things. She also has a thing for jewellery. It follows, of course, that she has a thing for losing jewellery. A nosepin down a drain, or a ring in the sewer, or earrings in the move. Yet she guards heirlooms with her life, holding them deep within the palm of her heart.

She saves them for a stormy night, and a cliff looking over the rocks below. She hopes they will help her find the voices she heard in the autumn, when the nights traded places amongst themselves, and time stretched and turned inside out.

To this day, she looks, but the nosepin, the ring, the earrings, they've all lost shelter in the rains and their mountains in the wind.

Co-Parallel Dimensions

I sleep in a city by the water, with inclines up and down, arbitrarily placed amidst the paved pathways winding through narrow streets. Each night, as I sleep, I walk past our little China Town, where the people work hard, and are always helpful, and make sure your groceries get to you on time. People that I know I do not know greet me as they cycle by, shiny red blurs underneath the weight of blacks, greys, greens, khakis. I walk up a narrow staircase to an apartment I know from my time in New York. How I managed to find it in this coastal slumberville, I cannot say, but it feels like home, so I am glad to share the feeling.

-

She had eyes that made you feel loved, and a heart that made the earth swallow you whole. As he held her tummy to tummy, she still brought to him the smell of the riverbed where they had decided to lose each other to find themselves. He kissed her brow, and settled back on his knees, cradling her cheek to cheek.

"Seven years is a hard stretch of time."

He nodded, still not sure of what he would say. What could he say? That he'd still not found himself? That he was rather better off having found her than looking for himself? He held his peace, and gave it her name every chance he got.

-

I awake, only to be unsure of where I have found myself. The water has chopped and churned itself into a cityscape, dull lights wading through the grey smog of a winter morning. On my bedside table, there sits a note:

"Thank you for everything. You will always be my favourite, even when we're lost at sea."

So I return to sleep, to search the waters for what we've lost.

A Swansong Debut

And what of me?

You can play the audience

as I crumble to my knees

as the weight of this melody

sings to set me free.

The Aah-ness of Things

"There's more."

"More?"

"Yes. So much more."

"Show me when I'm dreaming."

She kissed his eyelids, and told him to fall asleep.

-

It was the most beautiful reverie. I swam through sands and emerged onto the surface, to walk on an ocean's breath. The water was a transparent mirror. I saw dense foliage populated with creatures of immeasurable brilliance, insects crawling with kaleidoscopes flitting from carapace to carapace, an entire colony thrumming as one single organism. Planets spoke to each other, and the satellites danced through astral projections, like children in chase snaking through long halls and corridors. I saw history play itself out in a second, and it let me see everything, that had happened, was happening, would happen. Time had burst at the seams, and my greedy hands grabbed at everything I could take in stride.

I felt a shoulder on my hand, and turned around to face her.

"You like what you see?"

"Darling, this is unbelievable. It throbs in my heart and my head, and it's clawing at my skin, and oh darling, this is such bliss, such euphoria, such..."

"I'm glad you liked it. Sorry."

-

He woke up, and found himself staring at sheets of white cotton. He pushed himself up, looked around the room, and instantly he knew; there was not a single trace of her.

She might as well have never been.