describes the universe

There are times when I know I am about to make a bad decision before it has happened. Some might call this foresight. However, in order for foresight to be complete follow through must also exist. It’s not enough to just know; there must also be doing. My trouble stems from the fact that I see the options ahead of me along with the myriad of consequences, but I cannot find the drive to take heed of the outcome.
I’ll give an example: hypercolor t-shirts. Adolescence is no time to wear heat sensitive material. My young body producing the kind of sweat that carries an odor for the first time in all of my life and strange lumps protruding and pushing upward on the flesh that used to be perfectly flat. The result was predictable: lightened spots under the armpits like the inverse of sweat stains and light round circles over the burgeoning breasts. Yet, I still fell hook, line, and sinker.
You are the hypercolor to my adult life.
I knew even before I contacted you what would happen. There is a certain amount of predictability to our situation and I don’t know if this implicates you more than me. Regardless, when we found ourselves in a cold embrace, I was not surprised. Our bodies pressed against each other on the couch were like puzzles pieces that fit together but do not reveal corresponding pieces of the picture.


it’s as though everything we had done prior had led up to this moment. i should be present, because it could be the happiest moment of my life.

We held onto each other as if we were desperately trying to hold onto ourselves and we felt something slipping. Something was getting away from us and we needed to hold tighter, except the tighter we clung the further this thing, this us, slipped away.
I kept my eyes closed. I was afraid of looking into your eyes and seeing the truth. I didn’t want to see the way you looked at me and I wanted even less for you to see the way I looked at you. I was pretending you were someone else. Someone who is real, someone who is not you at all. I focused hard on your nose until my vision blurred and I could think of you as the stranger I see in passing on the bus and have always wanted to press my face against. Except, my face was pressed against yours and I could not bear the thought. So, I thought about other things instead.

there were no vows made, no grand expressions of affection. yet, we always imagined there would be more. yet, all we had was my constnat breath whistling through your ear as though your ear were a wind tunnel.

On occasion, I would open my eyes. It was cathartic to gaze upon you, dashing my dreams and then, close my eyes and rebuild them. In these moments I would imagine a great divide. We weren’t actually here, so close, feeling each other up on your sofa. There was an infinitely expansive universe between us that grew exponentially with every whisper, with every caress. My lips were booster rockets that propelled you into oblivion. My hands were groping for solid ground on a new planet. This planet was not held within the boundaries of your skinny jeans. This planet was in the new universe that we were creating, that our void made a reality.


in the end, as people, our desires carry us away from our needs. they are our undoing and resurrection—a cleansing forest fire that will surely create new life.

The next morning, as I sit stirring a swirl of creamer into my coffee I felt as listless as god must have felt as he swirled his finger through the empty universe of his own creation. I looked into my cup and saw un-actualized potential in the reflection of the stranger peering back at me. I looked up at you, I saw the darkness I hoped to escape by being with you in the first place.
Before I set the momentum of this train in motion, I was terrified that I would feel something real. That I would fall in love and there would only be heartbreak and sorrow for you are not a creature who can love. I was entirely unprepared for the stark reality that is going through motions that are absent of any real feeling. It is a hollow place. It is dark and cold. Furthermore, it is disorienting. You cannot tell up from down or forward from backward. So, you just stay in one place, stagnant and unmoving. I was about to fill the silence by telling you all of these things I was not feeling and wished desperately to be feeling. I needed to create an emotion, because feeling nothing is worse than feeling something really bad.
I was relieved when you told me I had to go. Our new universe found a way to tell me to keep my mouth shut and I listened. The walk was cold and rainy. It seemed fitting and gave me something to feel. The void was filled. We both got what we had wanted all along.