february, 2024

i.

i can’t understand for the life of me why everything i feel enters me like a meteor strike and then builds itself a home in me and never leaves, and my body is only a resting place for all the young love from all the women i have been, a museum for all the altars i built, the names written in the sky, all the notes in all the margins. i have written myself into a corner. i’ve learned to wear all my tragedies like laurels pinned to my chest, smiling with all our teeth out and bleeding out into the pavement. i don’t know how to be without indifference as a death sentence. i don’t know how to let poetry be poetry and not a prognosis for hard times, or why i wear my want so wantonly.

the first month we met you said you’d never seen the truman show but couldn’t remember the name of the movie. i saw it that night on my computer and thought of you the whole time. i imagine you in the backlight, slim and kind and beautiful in the way only i understand, growing smaller now in my memory. i learned to be alone before i ever learned to be in love. somehow it has not prepared me for all this.

ii.

the miracle of human connection is also its own tragedy, and i’m having trouble understanding that this is really just what it means to be living: to accept the cosmic interrelations, the collisions we make, and the wreckage we cause as simply the mundane reality of everyday existence. how anyone manages to go on with this knowledge while living their everyday lives remains a mystery to me. unless we are all simply pretending. in which case i really hope we all are.