if you can find me.

From half a notebook where thoughts formed into the shape of clouds, I write and piece together the shades from my eyes onto a page; my mind turning on a spit over an open flame, producing steam as a whistling kettle. I get sideways glances and curious looks from passersby’s whose interests have been mildly piqued, but not enough to ask why I am writing from the top branch of a very public tree.  Perhaps I simply appear to have it all together, and indeed would never fall off of the branch because of the official looking crease between my eyebrows, and the intensity of my challenging gaze.

The sky is a solid blue today, but I find myself missing the textures of the billowing firmament  blooming over the mountains – ever changing – and the wind’s whisper in the air, shifting between budding branches.

Winter is beginning to release its bony fingers from the tender flesh of spring as it is lying down to set into a plump slumber.

I am writing without a well-defined purpose now, simply absorbing the pleasure resulting from drawing a black ink pen across a blue lined page, simply to splatter my emotions onto an empty canvas. I am writing letters to the dead willow’s ashes, the bones of the ocean and the island’s craggy skin. I am writing to you, in everything around me.

I cried the night I realized that I was in love.

I fell in love as we watched the sunset – with the light disappearing from the sky, slipping between the fractures in the mountain; the dusk rushing in as the last tinge of reddish orange evaporated into a fine mist hovering forever around our spinning bodies; as we paused for a fraction of a moment to stand in the fading light as the feathers of warmth brushed past our skin, tearing our eyes away from the submersion of the world for us to gasp for air before we drowned.

I fell in love even knowing that between the meeting of our fingertips – I would never have you; as surely as the Earth tilts and spins, the fire in your eyes would melt away as easily and as quickly as the dimming light.

So I dropped your hand, and looked into your face as I watched the colors fade away into a blank empty stare, and almost felt relieved because solitude is so much easier to bear as I wait for my only. He is the cold lone star that burns up every quiet layer of my paper night.

I cried when I found myself one night, standing on the slick pavement with the dim light of a city streetlight washing over me; when I found myself on the stained porch steps of a vacant flower shop eleven bus stops from home; when the skies opened in the blackness and the rain ran icy rivulets into my eyes and down my face, when my sneakers were drenched, I just stood there and wondered whether his eyes were blue or brown.  

~C