1.   I woke up with sand stuck to my back, sun off to the right somewhere and coming with a determined look. I was crispy red and stiff, groaning from one too many of whatever that was last night, and I didn't know where anything was let alone you. There was no evidence left where you should have been; no body shaped divot in the sand where you had been when I fell drowsy and clumsy onto the beach. You were phantom unmanifest, suddenly erased from the world.

I couldn't bear the thought of finding you then, so I waited there until the sun once again berated me from its higher place. High and lofty in the sky as you had once been while I was in a deep haze, looking down on me with a smirk as I tried to read your mind. You dazzled me then, burn marks and trails in my brain while I tried to mark your progress. But that was eons ago now, and I was left in the echoing shell of you. I didn't know what would become of me.

I shut my eyes and hungered for the waves that were too far away to be more than a buzz of noise in the corner of my ear. They must have been as far away as you were, lost forever across an expanse of sand and sun. How could you leave me here when you knew what kind of state I was in? I was incapable of rebuilding the world without you. I didn't even know where to start. Where would the sparks come from? How could I have convinced the air to stick around?

But of course you were there. I couldn't see you through the static of my brain until you pushed your way back in, throwing elbows and wisps of hair over me while I tried to breathe. I couldn't have missed you before, opening my eyes and looking at the clear evidence. There you were, the rain pouring down on the sand. There you were, beams of light throwing shadows over us like blankets.

 

2.   You fell into my life out of a back alley, stumbling out into traffic. I stood agape as you weren't turned into a disintegrated corpse, your arms flailing toward the unseen god protecting you. When you successfully reached the opposite curb and fell flat on your ass, I knew that I had to meet you. And by meet you I mean drunkenly chase you down the street as you skittered off again.

You danced like a failed rocket launch, dangerous and appalling, throwing off sparks and smoke. You were an icon of destruction devouring the street. There was no way I was going to catch up with you in my state, although I tried for reasons that I couldn't understand. You ducked into a bar packed full of people, and was afraid that you had gone back to whatever strange land you had come from. But there you were, downing a shot of some depressing looking booze, and I managed to get a good look at you through the din. Bright light and depleting darkness surrounded you then, a moving image that will always be the way that I see you when I think of you..

Of course you knew that I was hunting you, and yet you played this stupid little game with me. You led me along a winding path through what would have been life if I had bothered to turn my head away. Instead the buzzing noises fell on my deaf ears, and those crashing moments were deflected into the void that you left in your wake. You were my goal, but I was lost in the pursuit, stumbling and guessing and letting that confusion define me. But you grabbed my hand while I scanned a room for you, dragging me off through a hole in the wall you created for yourself. I wondered how you knew I was there, subconscious already chewing on the bones of the obvious facts.

That first night, you were an axe that split me in half. You were the air that I ate while I tried to understand why I was even there, fumbling the old thoughts while you poured new ones over top. You lit us both on fire, running ragged metallic shards on the concrete. Suddenly you were the tallest thing in the world, and I was ready to be obliterated under your irresistible power. How did you know? How on earth did you know?

 

3.   The answers were always within reach when we were there, sputtering through some forsaken place. We had the world there with us, guiding us down the path in ways unknown. We slid through the landscape like grizzled veterans, waiting for our targets to appear. There was no other way for me to live then, so I grabbed onto it religiously, trying to break myself on the edges of reality that I was painfully sure still existed.

We exploded when we needed to, dropping out of this world and into the other at the slightest provocation. There we were together in color and flame while the rest ticked on without notice. We wondered if the others saw us here, poorly hidden under these transparent waves. When we returned, you were there and I was happy to know you were there. Sometimes slowly, we would begin again in formless shapes until we pulled things back together.

Through all of that, we were still bound to the earth physically, but the details were drowned in the buzz of the world we actually lived in. Who could be bothered to remember the names of the towns when we were up in the clouds above them? Who could remember the faces when we were down in the mud, gasping our first breaths and waiting to be saved?

I know that we were forged in these moments, blinking flashes of light falling on dusty thoughts. We pushed ourselves into moonlit rooms and hoped for these little bits of paper and glass to whisper the answers in our ears. And even when the voices were yelling and angry, I was always happy to be there. When the secrets were told, we were let in to the truths that others didn't have a chance to understand. We were chosen, you and I, and the mundane little things didn't even matter anymore.

 

4.   We are set adrift, forced to live in a universe too cold for warm hearts. Knowing better will not save us. We all evaporate into the same dust and air and flowers in our own time. We are all going to lie there sometime, supposedly peaceful painted faces pointed at unknown ceilings. I want to be in a jar instead, where no one can tell what I really was before the flames. But I will still be there, dust all the same.

Our little show doesn't keep this from being real, and sometimes it only magnifies this fact. But maybe we all belong under the rug with the rest of the dust. I embraced the sacred moment as it sits there, ready and greedy with hungry eyes. When I smoke until the green is brown and black, I can see those eyes staring at me still. I know you see them too, even when we are composed and living in the real world. They make me want to run and scream at the purple stars that hang above the wheat, begging them to send some kind of mystical hope.

In those sparse moments when we are laying there in darkness, your arm a knot securing me to you, I wonder if you know what I mean when I start talking this way. It feels like this world doesn't want us in it, and instead we do these things as a rite of sacrifice to keep us in good graces. All the while, we ignore the simple fact that we are slowly killing ourselves, hand in hand. This is the filter that I look through sometimes, and behind this screen the world feels all broken and wrong.

I see your eyes then, bright and fighting their way out of the halo of curls around your head, trying to find whatever bit of truth there is up in the ceiling. You are always looking for hope when I am down in the pit waiting to be finished off. I suppose that is the difference there, even in our incoherent moments when we are off looking for other worlds. You become the beacon that shows the way home.

I don't know how we got in here, and I don't know where the exits are. But that's probably the point of the whole thing now. We have us and the things that we do, and the world will keep on spinning and blinking whether we admit it or not. Even when we make things confusing or weird, whether on purpose or by accident, I can be okay with this. I'm glad that I'm here, and I'm really glad that you're here with me.

 

5.   You are chimes and rust and deep breathing exercises. You are the Saturday morning cup of coffee that has been waiting all week to be created. You are dams busting right over my head and sweeping me all the way out to the sea. You take up every corner of every space I have ever seen. You are the growing shadows when the sun sets, and the porch light that tries to fight against them. You are dripping condensation in the early fall, too late for your friends. You are all the fucking futures.

I never meant to write you love notes, but here they are all the same. It is embarrassing, because we were never about love. We were about those moments that we felt we could handle, and the sure belief that there was a door we could go through together if we used the right keys. We were rash and wild, running free and hazy through an alien world of structure. So when I think these things, the first thing that I want to do is apologize. Love doesn't feel like it should fit in there at all.

Sometimes when we put ourselves in the glow, I know that I cry out songs of love to you. In those moments, everything is true and I feel that you feel the same way. The blurring lights come together and tell us the story of ourselves. You say you see the same things too, so maybe even in that world of illusions there are things that we conjure that become real.

If it isn't real, then I don't want to have anything to do with reality anymore. I want to float with you on our little hearts, and dream the sweeping lines with you forever. And if we sink, so be it.

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