it is not cold nor barren here

i. twenty years and a lifetime ago i sat on the edge of a pier and scraped my fingernails into warped wooden planks and let the guppies and piranhas lick at my feet. behind me was a man with a bowler hat and too many hiccups; he was bloated and blue and very dead, and his lips were white and cracked where his tongue followed paths like those the dragonflies created in every buzzing freefall. he told me the meaning of life, told me why gerbils sometimes eat their offspring and why the world sagged with the weight of itself, but all i heard was the water bubble from his lips, thick and muddy from deep in his lungs.

ii.
six years and two months ago the universe cracked open and light poured from your mouth as you told stories of places that didn't exist, of people you've never met, never will meet, that shape the world you live in. you took to the sky and took up a language and told anyone who didn't ask that this was just the way you were built and you meant no harm so crying was unnecessary. please stop, you liked to say, please let it go, but the universe spilled a constant stream of things you couldn't close your eyes against and the foreign sounds your tongue wouldn't form, the shapes your mouth twisted to when you tried to tell them all, they were blocked out by the light that flared until your retinas were expanded out to look to the sea.

iii.
yesterday i pressed my hands flat against the air above my bed and wondered why it was so hard for me to move. i thought about calling someone, calling out; i thought about all the bigots of the world, about how loneliness was as inherently ingrained into the world as the dips and mountains and shapes of the continents. i read a book about erosion and plate tectonics and burned it the next day, threw it onto a pile of maps and atlases and that postcard from California i found lying on the side of the road, the ink running and faded but signed 'love, Harvey' with a flourish. i watched the corners fold in and blacken as it burned and in my bed i thought about that weight and the way people will always be people, and variance is reserved for stupid naivety, and the world is so damn heavy and big and full, and how, despite it all, it's never really seen.

ii.
today you walk. you walk until the blisters on your feet are split open and stinging, sore against the rough sand, the soft grass, the scorched concrete, the upturned gravedirt. you carry with you a silence that is maddening and brilliant memories that are tethered to dreams and morph so drastically they flitter away as regrets and sadness. your lips are sewn shut and your atrophied tongue lolls thickly against your gritted teeth. you want to believe in Odin, that there are faeries in Ireland, that Kamburgriva did nothing wrong in opening his voice to a world he was so far above, but exhaustion takes a hold of you and you believe in the weary path of your blind footsteps and not much else. today you walk and your lashes are starred with tears and it all becomes so extensive and strange you forget where and who you are -- within it -- at all.

i. years from now i will be happy. maybe i will be so happy i can hardly breathe for it. i will try to ignore any voice telling me that maybe i will still be on a pier or in my bed and nothing can change at all. years from now i will plant my feet between Muliphein and know the taste of karidopita; i will forget the bloated blue man and all that pressure and i will unlock my joints and i will meet someone like you, someone just like you, that will prove me wrong, teach me more than i can ever know, and show me beyond what my eyes can see.