Find me

While his memories paced back and forth like expectant. Fathers, he tries on the loneliness like a loose-fitting shirt. Somewhere in the room there is the ticking of a palmetto bug. It reminds him of the planes to Kosovo, the fading crackle of wireless ground-to-air talk. He’d like to take an eraser to that life, leaving just a few ghosted lines separating one nothing from another nothing. Outside on his window there is a darkness except for one balcony where a woman is sitting. The smoke of her cigarette disappearing into the stories reflected in the windows above her. She is probably reading one of those romance novels where the characters speak in the extinct language she of a love she once knew.

Okay, let’s drop the fiction. You know who you are. Despite searching for yourself under a stone, in trash bins, behind boarded doors of houses about to collapse. The old love pile up like skeleton sculptures in a Capuchin monastery. What do they know about how we come back? The things that are wanted to be said are as light as helium. Now its 12.14 A.M. in this world, to parallels meet, the circle never closes. Maybe you have cried out in your sleep. By fall well be able to see right through the forest into the future. By then you’ll know this about me. The palmetto bug is just keeping on time.

What’s a stake here is how we defined ourselves. You are me when you are not you. I am you when I am not me. The branch above us wonders if it is time to fall. Our lives line in the post office and supermarket walls like runaway children. Sometimes we just want to appear in our own mirrors. I’ve double-locked the doors. Its so hot that the blackout won’t end for a few more days. In Lebanon the light spreads out like shards of a mortar round. One family trying to escape its hit by a random bomb. This is really about us, isn’t it? Where the bombs really random? Who was it? It is a act of Defense? There a barge struck where the river changed course. Day and night take turns trying to escape pur field of vision. Hope spreads its tentacles but we know better. It is war, for lands that don’t even belong own.

When I started, this was supposed to be about love. But look, we can’t even control what we think about the moon, the trains distant whistle which is sad or promising, the existence of centaurs, peacekeepers, runaways, skeletons. I can’t stick to one subject for more than a line. In no time, I will find a real self. I don’t know how many bugs have come through this open window, a kind of lung these lives pass in and out of. The branch, too, is about to fall. You, it, have no idea of how much of me this love has become. You will never know.