i feel like the heaviest whale pressed into the surface of a colorless frozen lake which our big wet bodies splinter like bones
i shake branches out of your sheets and write inside your mouth about ghosts snapchatting each other pictures of a bird mummuration
sparrows eating fast-food salads with their plastic forks
Dear Reader,
I’m having the world’s saddest orgasm. I haven’t puked in over a year and I want to change that so come over; we can fill the soft, feathery parts of our mouths with apologies and lay in the dark wondering where ghosts go when they're tired of being zipperless and walking into walls. Reader, I feel inadequate mostly. I took a pill to shrink myself down to the size of a flea and crawled inside an ant hill while giant things built homes on top of me. I think I wanted to apologize for always wanting to apologize. I think I wanted something fatal to happen to me. I wish we could all just accept the skin we were thrown out of the dark stitched inside. Tonight, I held your broken face and palmfuls of your tiny glass teeth and, reader, do you remember my friend from high school who unraveled his DNA with an open paperclip? Do you remember my best friend’s grandfather who died and how afterwards her grandmother walked around the house with her pockets hanging inside out? I think people can be a little hard to keep inside of sometimes. Reader, I heard someone say that maybe we are the universe. I heard myself crying in your bed in Manhattan, and smoking with the Puerto Ricans outside your subdivision in Chicago. You were holding my head back in the bathroom of a club in Los Angeles, but I think maybe it would have been easier to have a conversation without each others genitalia in our mouths. Some mornings, I like to lie in bed with my eyes closed and feel my arms and legs before my eyes have a chance to create them, but Reader, I think I'm doing okay right now. Maybe every drop in the ocean is also its own ocean. Maybe everyone can unfold like aged pieces of origami and avoid eye contact as they buy two cherry slushies and walk side by side down the road into oblivion. Everyone can decide to be killed as quietly as possible, probably, but Reader, when my best friend’s aunt was sick, the sun still rose, and we still rode that ride at Castle Park that pinned us screaming against the moon-softened wall, the tree outside my house threw purple figs all over the sidewalk.
Reader,
i pour lakewater into your open mouth
and you gasp for air while swirling things make homes inside of you
we eat in the flatbed of your truck, lying down,
and i think that i like it when the sky feels good about itself
and does the beautiful things
so i curl my fingers like talons around tiny bits of concrete
and build a nest at the back of your closet for both of us to live
Dear reader,
send help.
I have a bird’s-eye view of myself lying asleep in your bed and I think I’m crazy because I don’t need any more proof than this. If you knew you were going to die tomorrow I hope you would still do the exact same things but sleeping can be done anytime so, Reader, give me a couple of minutes to explain. In a nest at the back of your house is a prerecording of the last conversation we will ever have and it will be brilliant. Reader, I am sorry but I have loved everything that left
me, and everything that pushed me out. I loved all the broken branches, all the different ways that air fights through small gaps to escape, lakes so flat and so impossibly wide beneath us. I loved all the mornings without the sun, the train barreling off the end of long patterned tracks to fall earthless and screaming into the soil, and planted like so many little teeth, the deep sky ripped and gray and pressed and unheard of.
Reader, I’m in a
temporal state
of rearranging all the bones in my face in front of people and I wish I could stop
staring at strangers and wonder what they're thinking about me. I wonder if, Reader, you will
read this and not feel anything in particular except a little wider on the inside. I
wonder how many spaces you'll fall into.
I think I want to see all the colors that humans can’t see, and Reader,
I wonder if there'll be a fire so big that all the firefighters in the world will not even try to fight
it, they will just stand in front of it staring and holding hands.
Reader,
There's a bird singing out my bedroom when I wake up.
Its body paper pressed and palm sized and speckled brown.
It looks happy, it is morning and the bird is singing through its nostrils,
like no good bird should.
Adefisayo Adeyeye is a writer from Southern California. He has had works published by Shabby Doll House, Potluck Magazine, and has work forthcoming from Boost House. He blogs sometimes over at papercranechronicles.tumblr.com.
