#sd!p

[swingsdown]

the inch of light between us will have traversed 9.5 trillion kilometers, 365 days from now.

time and distance and the memory of us, of this moment in the golden hour palette of your kitchen, tangled in a way quantum physicists haven't quite figured out--

i know it's not technically possible, but i swear that i feel the entire light-year of space even now, even then.

[swingsdown]

do you ever feel like,

physically peeling yourself apart and digging your heart out, like

“oh, so this is what it is”

do you think it’ll help me understand myself better? do you think it’ll make

me feel a little more real?

[swingsdown]

i can buy myself flowers and dainty ceramic vases and soft throw blankets in colors of the sunset by the dozens; i can sweep and mop and scour the dust and dirt from behind the fridge every single week, arrange and rearrange the furniture but--

these things do not make a home; nothing makes a home unless you first find something to fill the shape of your soul.

the late afternoon sunlight veils me in gold. i bend my head over the empty notebook. i wait. 

[swingsdown]

There is nothing I can say on the subject of love that has not been said before. When you have too much of it; when it runs out; the grief and the joy. But I want to, anyways. I want to tell you about the way it feels when it is giddy and new, and you think you can trust the other person with everything. You want to give them everything, even if they don’t want it; you think you will perish if you don’t. 

What an extraordinary thing it is, that trust. Love doesn’t render us blind; it gifts us optimism. Love sees the faults and the what-ifs, and it says: so?

Love’s ubiquity doesn’t render it less powerful, doesn’t cripple it like it cripples you when it leaves a hole, deep with wanting, where you feel your soul must have been. It feels exactly like that. 

I think if I had to assign a shape to love, it would look like a melon baller, shining impersonally in the late afternoon light of the kitchen of your old house. A melon baller, to neatly scoop out the most necessary--the most essential--parts of you.

A melon baller; a picture of it, and underneath the caption and this too, is a self-portrait.

[swingsdown]

the axis of the world and you stand tipped on one side alone and lonely and everything awful that you have done to yourself inane little things inane in the sense that

none of it matters just let go you tell yourself that everything passes the green of new growth all the more blinding after a forest fire

but you are not a forest fire you are not inexorable and inevitable

you dangle, like someone else has pushed you off the edge but you chose to take the step you chose it.

you. 

[swingsdown]

my sadness used to mean something; for every hour of sleep it took it gave something in return

i thought it made me special that there at the root of me was something that wept beautifully and i could collect my tears and fill a moat and at the center would be me in a tower

isolated but safe faraway but wonderful

instead

an imbalance like clockwork look at this

(a graph a picture who i am  laid bare and transparent  on black and white film)

now a routine a pain that takes but provides nothing else

// a.s

[swingsdown]

four years ago this week you gave yourself  nine stories of air 

nine stories of air to figure it out to see how your chest could be so filled with absence and grief that it had room for your heart for your lungs

did you? did you?

[swingsdown]

i am the stone worn smooth by the sea, waiting for the right hands to pluck me from these waves.