Three siblings into which to cry, though one bears a hole so I don’t recommend crying in that one because it will never be full. You’ll wake up only to cry yourself to sleep and be so so dry pls stay safe and hydrated please stop crying.
A hierarchy I cannot fulfill always placed a premium on us time at the beach. Me time by your sundial. Us time on the porch. The chair, the dinner, the grass, the confusion, the water, the water, the water, the walk. The acts I performed for that time. The things I did to try and get it back. The aggressive alienation that comes with unknowing and remembering it to sand, where, between my fingers, it ceases to have ever existed at all.
I daren’t call it torture; I do not know its name. It’s on my back and underneath my skin. I’ve done it to myself. I cannot outrun it, and I cannot stop.
I can now admit that you were right. Underneath it all was a very brittle emotional reality: I wanted to paint pots in your backyard. I am in love with the birds, and I am in love with the sky, and I want to roll in the marsh. I was in love with the water. I was in love with the sun. You bristled at the idea that I might love you, so I didn’t. You were far too bitter and far too future-fearful. You lash out when you panic. You flail with a sack of rotten teeth. I couldn’t love you past the smell. Except in the dream where I could paint pots on top of the bricks on top of the ants under the birds next to the sundial in your yard. I loved you so much there in the not-future. In that delusion you’re so nice and so comfortable with yourself you are somewhere upstairs outside away happy individual all day and come down “sunset already?” and you make ramen and point at the sun “Is it always that large?” and I say “Yes!” and we high five and you stop remaking me a lover’s lover loving stupid joy-creature here to take you from something I don’t know about that you try to control in me to control yourself. This was my gambit! I wound up painting indoors. I am in love with the dust mites. I am in love with the window. I have never loved anything at all.