A band of purple clouds moves over the sun and floods the room in blue. I whip the sheets off and hit the floor. I haven’t slept in three weeks. I’m emotional but I’m cool about it. God, I’m so cool about it. I could bottle this feeling up and peddle it as antifreeze. Would you buy it from me? Would you buy anything, from me?
The air takes an ovoid shape around me. Veined petals of gritty blood, wet on my forehead and on my greenish chicken claws. I close my eyes and wait. Soon, I know, the bells will chime. The pounding will begin. This speckled eggshell will crack into shards, and many calloused angel hands will clamp around my waist and chuck me unceremoniously, like a poorly pitched ball, into the current of current affairs, the flood of the flood.
I try my best, I do. I try my best until I don’t.
My thoughts of you are a talisman from a temple. Your hand on the handle, and then into the wound of the conventional. My thoughts of you are so replete with terrifying potential that I think I could summon you, as though through a pentagram. You emerge, head first, from the center of this star.
You shadow me through the banality of the light and you have been everywhere I have been. You were there when I skipped an afternoon meeting to walk the beach, feeling my heart fall to my feet and surge and break like the surf. Both baby-blue sneakers hanging from the fingers of one hand. At the bridge, you sent your messenger, a brown-eyed stray, poised, pert, expectant. Seeing him there, I trembled and returned the way I came. Humidity dripping in tears down my back at Rama IX Park. Under the tulipwoods, you were there, cast in shadow, pressing play on one song over and over, rubbing its chords into my brain like marinade until every strip of lace in me ripped with agony.
Enough is enough!
In a moment of bravery or cowardice, I bite you back. But you bubble up again like fat off a broth, foam off a fountain and suddenly I am shit-scared and three seconds from breaking down at the Linjiang Street Night Market. Light glancing off the water of the bay like a blow. The sunset over the rail line, pinking the wrinkled silk of my emotions. Your breath, hot at my back as I wander the market. I whirl around but I am alone in the maze of stalls, surrounded by strangers in the purple twilight, only a girl of two-hundred bones cast haphazard on an altar.
What’s the lesson at the end of this story? I bust a blood vessel in my finger and find blue, fig-shaped, under the skin. Tape the middle and index together in a white cross. Tongue-tied, you cross my mind. Cross my heart, hope to die. Body heat so hot off me, I could boil the ocean. I say nothing but I radiate this pain like a belt of moonlight. Meteorites pinballing a path through my stomach, knocking hard against the pulp of my hips. I am as proud and as ignorant as ever. I look up at the suffering of a shooting star and try my best to sympathize.
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