anyway i wish the ceilings were always high and the sun always glimmered outside and windows were always big and imposing and draped in heavy curtains. i wish i had a bust of shakespeare on my desk and tons of old books (already annotated by a foreign hand) and i wish my father was a professor and started teaching me etymology as soon as i could read and that we had a compost pile among our garden of teeming weeds and overgrown flowers. i wish i could bleed out on an ancient greek battlefield. i wish i had enough time to watch old movies all the way through and to devote isolated days to wandering through forests and crafting picnic baskets and reading sappho and dickinson. i wish i was more comfortable with self-revelation. i wish i was born as an old tragedian in thebes or as a naive gay poet during the romanticist era or on the coast of italy or maybe as the angel that visited mary
