Moving Day

I can feel my death closing in. Pressure on the air, the feel of wind against the glass. I have hidden in the deep woods since before humans came here, and yet they continued to come despite all I do. They came, until there were too many. Until now, when a magician comes. I am far from the places they go, but even so I feel the magician, feel their power like something vast stirring at the bottom of an ocean. It is within me to sense such things, to use that to hide, to know when to flex my own power. To know when to keep still. To know when to strike, if needs must lead me down that path.

If this magician dies, another will come. I can feel the world outside my woods: the roar of human vehicles, the pressure of human lives, the shattering of the old places. To find another place to hide, to travel through their lands: I do not know if I have it in me anymore. I do not want to die, but the hunger wants so many other things. Five days, six, a week. Perhaps more since I ate. I hide, moving through trees, flowing within mosses and claiming shadows for my own. Moving, because I feel uneasy each time I stop.

A good monster hides from its prey. A wise one is so good the prey never know they exist, but I have eaten a half-dozen humans in the past year. Tried not to, but I have, and the human world is connected in ways I scarcely grasp. A net forming. A trap being made, though I do not understand how. I am considering options, how few they are, when I smell the human. A child, alone, walking down the path with a phone in hand. No adults. No one is with him. He does not smell of poisons, not of some bait meant to kill a monster – though humans rarely make such sacrifices. Even so, I am uneasy. A test by the magician? Magicians can do things other humans would never consider. I do not know if making a child be bait would be one in this time or place.

I move, and move again, gather moss for flesh, stray twigs for the bones of a new body, move out from behind trees to the path behind the child. I lash out, the hunger strikes out, and the child is somehow not there, behind me instead. I react on instinct, hurling power into the world. The magician will know where I am, but instincts can only be mastered so long. Somehow the child avoids the flare of energy that kills every animal about me. It will be some time before I have energy for that again.

The boy is staring at me through dark glasses, up at me in a way that suggests he isn’t seeing me. Would even humans let a blind child walk these paths alone? I pull back, knowing everything feels wrong. I should be leaving, fleeing deep into the woods, but something is holding me here. Some other power I can barely catch the edges of.

“That was really rude,” the boy says.

“Pardon?”My voice is the scraping of bone against bone; he doesn’t start at all.

“You hurt tons of animals and you didn’t need to because I’m just here to talk,” he says firmly.

I lash out, and the boy moves aside in a blur faster than anything human can move.

“Hello? I said talking, and we can’t have a good talking if you keep trying to eat me!”

“I’m sorry,” I say, without even thinking. I am not certain when last I was sorry for anything at all. The boy grins at that, and there is a power behind it. Not one I know, but power. Were he a magician, I would call it a binding. As it stands, I have no words for it yet.

“You are his familiar?”

The boy draws himself up at that to glare up toward me, radiating indignation. “I’m his friend,” he says, and lends the word a trust so deep it shakes me to the core.

I have not loved; it is not in the nature of my kind to do so, but I think that no human has loved as deeply as this boy trusts in a magician. Of all the beings one could trust, a magician is hardly safe. “But he sent you here,” I say, to say anything at all.

“Well, he felt you were scared of him but! you might not be of me because I’m Jaysome,” he says, and somehow I understand the meaning of the word I’ve never heard before.

“I have been the nightmare of this place for a long time. Keeping other monsters away with my legend, protecting humans when I could. But the world has changed. Too many food sources flee, vanish, and the humans are – sometimes I am hungry, and I cannot stop myself.”

“That’s totally what I told Honcho, because somethings bindings get all desperate and not-fun at all,” he says. “So we thought you could move somewhere quieter without humans, and that would be okay?”

“I have been here a long time. I do not know how to move.”

“Oh! Well, Honcho wanders a lot and I’ve learned from him and I could help,” he says.

“Why would you help me?”

“Because we’re friends,” the boy explains.

I draw back pulling my nature about me. I am more than moss and roots, more than vine and thorn. I can be wings and claws, fur and fangs as I must. “We only just met,” I say.

“But why wouldn’t you want to be friends?” he demands, looking hurt.

I draw back, stare down, let my power press against the world. The magician is both distant and close, a being more than a doing. The boy just stares up, utterly unfazed.

“What are you?”

“I’m Jay, and that’s a what too I think, and I’m from Outside the universe too but that means we could be friends and not fight because that’s just a really stupid thing to do!”

I sense nothing in him that is not human, though I know he can’t be human. Not with that speed, and certainly not that smile. “What will happen to the Barrens without me?” I say, and it comes out softer than I intend.

“I’ll do a binding to help protect it and Honcho will make sure it works and you can move somewhere fun without humans and start up a whole new legend,” he says, and he’s so happy for me that I find myself pleased as well. Power upon power, within this child.

I have no idea how many of my choices I’m making right now are my own; I think he is using influences on levels so deep I barely grasp them. Shaping me because he doesn’t want us to be enemies, and I – I have nothing in me to challenge that. Whatever he is, I am certain he could destroy me if I attacked him. And I am even more certain this magician knows this, and sent this boy rather than destroying me on is own.

So that I would have another choice. “Your magician, this Honcho, he is very wise. And wiser still to have a friend like you, I think.”

“I try to be a good friend, but I do have lots of adventures,” he says with a grin, and then his power is winthin me and without, as he hugs and the world shifts. Another forest, dark and still during the night as he lets go.

I have been unhomed and moved in moments. I shudder in fear, but the boy misses the fear and scrambles back.

“I didn’t mean to hug without asking, it was just fast and I think we’re in the rainforest so you get to meet human tribes and protect them and the rainforests from other people and I think that would be all kinds of Jaysome, right?!”

“It is – very acceptable,” I say.

The boy offers up another impossible grin and is gone between moments. I form a body slowly again, thinking about magicians and power, and wondering what Jay will become. But I let it go, for I have work to do and a new legend to create.

Cold Droughts

“You.”

I am halfway across the street but turn at the hate barbed into the word. The woman coming across the street is perhaps a year or two younger than I.

“That park bench you were sitting on was peeling and it isn’t anymore. You walked by potted plants and they stirred up from the drought.”

I keep walking; she crosses the road after, grabbing my left wrist in her right hand. “I know what you are,” she says, and there is nothing kind in her voice at all.

I merely raise one eyebrow and she lets go of my wrist as if stung. Most of the time, magic is quiet things, small changes almost no one notices in the world. It helps that people tend not to pay attention to such things. This woman is, though I am not sure she is seeing what others would.

“My sister is dying,” she says. “You will fix that.”

I let a whisper of my magic out, need meeting desire, meshing into will. A reaching, and a knowing. “Two doors down, the house with the blue shingles on the roof: a man is dying of cancer, begging for death from his wife. An ex-nurse, she knows so much she doesn’t dare to use, and her pain could be greater than his own.” I pause a beat, and continue. “Across the road, at the junction, an old dog is dying – loved, but in pain, and there is a family wishing that they could have just one more day without the dog in pain, one last memory for their son to have that isn’t his first brutal grasping of death. There are also, within this same street, two potential heart attacks and one car that, unless the breaks are talked to, is probably going to cause an accident within the next week.”

The woman steps back, fury and shame filling the air between us at all I leave unsaid. It is one of my gifts to speak truths that cannot be dismissed. It is not, always, a weapon. Enough so that I say nothing else, and wait.

“So, what, you just sit in some armchair, watch the world go by and the sun set in –.”

“The sun is always setting; it is also being born again. An old man who runs a bookstore told me a truth as deep as his magic goes, that the sun shines because it will go out. Knowing there is darkness is the reason for light, I think. And if magic could take away sorrow, it would not be magic at all. I can ease pain, yes. I can bend the world in small ways. But that is all any magician does, no matter how great and powerful our magics seem to be.”

“How do I become one?” she demands then, nd her anger gives a power to her voice. The resolve in her gaze remains unbroken. Never broken, not by something so small as the truth.

I look away first. “You have to want it more than anything else. And know how much you will pay, both for the magic and the cost of being a magician.”

“I would pay anything,” she says then, and I feel the world change with the force of her declaration.

I turn back, and the woman falls away with a sharp cry at whatever she sees in my face. “Then you have,” I say, with all the gentleness I can muster. “You choose to pay any price to become a magician, Brenda Klein, and you are paying the price for it now.”

Her eyes widen in horror as she realizes what anything means, and just how far it goes. “No. No, no, no.”

I walk away then and there is nothing in her to stop me. But perhaps enough to stop herself, perhaps enough to let go of the magic, to understand that power is not always power. And that sometimes all you can do is watch the sun set, hope it will rise, and know how painful freedom can be.

The Mysterious Text: A Not A Novel Publication

“Franklin.”

Four years of marriage lead to skills Sarah always calls our ‘marriage-sense’. The tingling of a bridge close to being burn, of a line close to being crossed. Every relationship a tightrope, at least some of the time. I look up from the text message. “I –.”

She reaches over, pushing our laptop away from the table. “It’s been three days.”

“I know. I’m just so fu–.” I bite back words.

“Deana is sleeping,” she says. “And if you wake her, you’ll have more to worry about than me.” But my wife smiles as she says it, the smile fading as she runs her fingers over my chin. “You haven’t shaved in two days.”

“I know, I just –.” I set my phone on our small office table that’s only called that because of the bills drawer. “I know something is wrong, Sarah. I’ve known Aiden since we were six years old: he is – was – is my best friend. I was the first person he came out to.”

“He was the best man at our wedding,” she says. “And convinced me to stick with you after that one party at Clover Point.”

“He did?”

“Phone calls afterwards, three of them. About how long he’d known you, that the drinks must have been spiked. That he turned out to be right helped.”

“Everyone else calls me Frank. Everyone at work, even my parents.”

“We don’t.”

I nod, gesture to the phone. “He used ‘Frank’ in his last text to me. He never did that. Refused to abbreviate anything unless he was in a hurry, and if he was there would be a period so I’d know it was Franklin. So I’d know it was my name. He had a new boyfriend, and he’s always – well, he’d have called Steven before the flight, after it landed. He would anyway, but he was – is – always does with regularity at the start of any relationship.”

“He would have sent us a picture of some street in Vancounver during the first day.”

“And he didn’t. He flew halfway across the country, and we know he left the airport and then – nothing. The police have enough to look into it: they’ll try, but it won’t be hard enough. I could almost hear the interest change when they decided it had to be an affair. I wanted to ask if they wanted another Pickton to escape them, but that wouldn’t have helped anything at all.”

Sarah laughs, as much in shock as surprise. “No, it wouldn’t.”

“And Deana is two, I can’t get time off work. Even if we could afford the flight.”

“I looked into our credit cards,” she says, stepping behind me to run fingers over my neck. “We can’t afford it. If we borrowed, it would have to be a friend willing to wait two years at least to be paid back, love.”

“I know. I know. He could be dying. Be dead. Be in some – and there is nothing we can do.” I don’t delete the message on my phone. I can do that much. I can read Vancouver news from so far away. I can hope. We can afford hope, if nothing else.

I force myself to stand, heading to the kitchen for a night cap and then bed. There is nothing we can afford to sell, nothing I can think to do in a world that doesn’t work like a mystery novel. I don’t know anything about solving crimes, nothing about finding murdered friends. All I know is that it all costs money, and that’s one thing we don’t have.

Moments of Jay

 “Jay.” Honcho walks into the RV. “There is a rather harried man in a suit here to see you. He says his name is Clive, and he was looking all over the city to try and find you for two days now.”

“Oh! Is he looking for hugs? Because I’ve only given out six this morning,” I say, getting off the one chair and hurrying to the door.

“I think he’s wanting something else,” Honcho says.

And he’s all a magician and really good with his voice so I don’t boing out of the RV and say hello like a Jay but just walk really boring like and stop as a man starts crying.

“You have to stop it,” he says.

“Huh?”

“Jay does many things,” Honcho says behind me. “Sometimes he even remembers doing them.”

I’d normally comment about that, but Clive sounds really scared and the bindings around me are frayed in weird directions human bindings don’t normally go.

“I was late for a meeting with a – a client. I said I was running out of time as I hurried across a road and there was a car and I got lucky and then this blind kid is asking if I’m ‘all kinds of stupid’ because he heard the car before I did AND probably saw it better than I did and he can’t even see’ and people were laughing but I was in too much of a hurry and the kid – you – you said something about finding time.”

“I did? I tend to leave Time alone because it gets all kinds of grumpy, but! humans have a lot more time than they think because clocks are inventions,” I say proudly, because I know stuff.

“There are two extra hours. To each day, to every day, the clocks have 13 hours for me and when it – the hands of the clock, the sounds. There is something in that, hiding, not wanting to be found,” Clive whispered. “I can’t get work done during them, not before them. It – it – it’s going to eat me, the thing inside the time we made.”

“But,” I say, “you still get all your work done, right? Cuz you’re really good at your job?”

“What?” Clive says in a really funny tone.

“That’s a really easy question,” I say crossly. “Because Honcho asks not-easy ones and I totally know what those are like.”

“I do,” he says.

“See?” I unmake the bindings on his perception with a huge grin. “You can’t run out of time because you did all your work in less time even when I gave you more!”

And Clive doesn’t even want a hug and almost says some really mean things before he runs away, which is definitely very rude.

“Jay,” Honcho says.

“I totally proved he had tons of free time and it worked,” I say.

“I know. But generally parables are a little more subtle than that if you want to subject someone to one.”

“Really? Even with humans?”

“Yes, even with humans.” Honcho ruffles my hair. “You were trying to show him a truth, but you can’t scare people toward the truth, Jay.”

“I didn’t know the extra hour stuff would be scary, since I’d never done it before for someone and –.”

“I know. It’s something to look into. But sometimes when people say things like that, you do know they don’t always mean them. We’ve talked about this a lot.”

“I totally know that, because Charlie says lots of mean things to me she doesn’t mean all the time!”

And Honcho says nothing at all to that, probably because I’m pretty clever too sometimes.

Birthday Presenting!

1.

A death marches out of the motel, a shadow of seething fury moving across the parking lot and onto the patio, eyes burning and fists clenched. “You are dead.”

“Good morning,” I say, drink my coffee, and gesturing to one sitting on the table. “Coffee?”

“Coffee,” Death repeats, in tones one would use to declare war.

“It’s quite good.” I pause a beat. “Also, you’re scaring the staff and customers in the coffee shop.”

Red fire burns, banks, flicks out, the shadows and god power being pulled deep within as Charlie sits carefully down. “I am still going to kill you, magician.”

“Knowing why would help. Not that I imagine you’d be short of reasons?”

Charlie smiles against her will at that. “You had to remind Jay that my birthday was tomorrow.”

“You thought he’d forget?”

“He was going to give me a ‘Jaysome hug’. You reminded him that he gives hugs a lot so now he’s looking for a gift,” she snaps.

“Oh.”

“And insisting he’ll find me the best gift ever. Remember him finding those smurfs?”

“They were small.”

“But not often blue since they covered their skin in the blood of their enemies and consumed an entire bear like land piranha would. You are going to make sure he gets me a sane gift. Or else.”

Even Charlie realizes the ‘or else’ goes too far, but I just raise an eyebrow. “Or else what?”

“Or else I convince Jay that magicians have lots of birthdays and see how many gifts he can bring you. Don’t think I won’t do it.”

I finish my coffee and stand. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Good,” she says, and begins drinking her coffee. And doesn’t even think to ask why I set Jay out to find a gift, or even why I’d do that. I leave her anger to blind her and poke Jay gently through bindings to find out where he is. And I pause, and wonder if at least some of her anger might be justified as I explain to Jay that Charlie definitely does not want the Loch Ness Monster as a birthday present, not even if Nessie wants a vacation.

I’m even more firm that Charlie won’t want Nessie’s ten thousand young.

2.

I don’t try and spend my birthday hiding, not really. But I sneak out of my RV, catch a bus across the city we’re in, lose myself in a dozen tourist things rating highly on Yelp, browse a museum for the first time since some school trip when I was twelve or thirteen. I can’t hide from Jay, even if I wanted to try. There are bindings connecting us together as friends and I’m not sure I could break all of that even if I wanted to. I know I couldn’t break them on his end.

Which is why my phone buzzes me in my left pocket shortly after noon despite the fact I made sure not to bring it with me. I sigh and remove it; Jay is from far, far Outside the universe and uses bindings in ways even the wandering magician barely understands. He’s also My Friend, which means more than I likt to think sometimes.

‘I TOTALLY HAVE YOUR PRESENT!!! :D’ is the text from Jay, who would definitely pout a lot if I tried to inform him I didn’t want it.

I remind myself that the wandering magician at least tried to vet the gift. And that Jay’s weird aggressive innocence means it can’t be that bad, and text back asking where it is. He responds with an address and enough exclamation marks to mak a teacher cringe in horror. I’d worry more at that except Jay is enthused by pretty much everything in the universe, and more than happy to share that with everyone he meets.

I debate calling the magician and demanding a heads up, but I doubt he’d give me one. I remind myself I’m a god-eater, that I have a god inside me, that I’m a trained exorcist and, most importantly, that I’m me. It helps, because I don’t give that a choice except to help, and I walk a good ten minutes to one of those modern restaurants. The kind where the food is more a decoration than something to be eaten, the staff all looking like they came out of a period piece.

There are just six tables inside a vast area, each cordoned off by plants, a couple of water features, various dividers all done up to seem as though they weren’t dividers at all. The cost must be ridiculous, but I doubt Jay even gave it a single thought.

The waiter has a perfect smile, ushers me to a small table, brings bread, along with water I’m told is GMO-free and smells of lemons. I half-hope that the magician convinced Jay that a meal was gift enough until he comes into the restaurant. Male. I’m sure of that much. Gorgeous, as if you melded together every Hollywood actor I loved and put them into one perfect body. The staff stare as well, shaken from their routines – possibly also their definitions of themselves – as he comes and sits across from me.

“Charlie?”

“Yes,” I say, relieved this doesn’t seem to be Jay in a disguise. “And you are?”

“John.”

“And this is a date?”

“If – if you want?”

“Okay. And what are you?” He blinks, not moving. “You look like every actor I’ve never thought was remotely cute turned into one person. It is, at the least, distracting but I’ve seen Walkers of the Far Reaches who could destroy people with a smile. So. Talk.”

“I am a tulpa, a creature made of thought. We normally cannot change our forms, but Jay altered me so I could do so, in exchange for a date with a friend of his?”

“And you said yes, knowing nothing about me?”

“Jay is very – persuasive,” John says. “Like a puppy you do not want to hurt. And I have done worse things than go on dates with strangers.”

Food arrives, though we haven’t ordered. The plates are small, the staff don’t hover and the food is shockingly good, enough to be a date all in itself.

“The pears,” I manage. “Like an orgasm.”

John lets out a laugh that seems entirely human as I catch up with what I said, and we share a grin as we eat some more. He tells me that he mostly does human things, lives a simple human life, does small work. Tries no to be noticed, because tulpas can’t change as humans change. He has no idea how Jay even found him, or why, but wasn’t about to question it.

“No matter the cost?” I ask finally as we’re drinking the dessert wine.

“I desire to survive, the same as everyone else.” His smile is small and sad, but beautiful for all of that.

I thank him and we leave, each going our separate ways. I almost make it two blocks before Jay manages to run into me. At least not doing so literally, since people would definitely comment if some blind boy slammed right into someone and their response was resignation.

“Kiddo.”

“Your date is over already? But I totally planned that, and helped John, and got the staff all ready to be Jaysome and has plans for a nice Hotel and everything,” he says.

I ruffle his hair gently. “I’m sure you did, Jay, but I didn’t need all that.”

“But –,” he protests, looking up at me.

“How about we just spend the rest of the day hanging out together,” I say.

“But we do that all the time! I wanted it to be all kinds of special and –.”

I press a finger to his lips. “The wanting makes it special, at least a little. We can hang out, talk, walk about without any adventures at all.”

Jay blinks a few times at that. “Without adventures?” he says finally.

I have to grin at his stricken look and hug him, letting go as I stand and taking his left hand in my right. “Just being with a friend can be adventure enough, okay?”

Jay considers that, then nods and grins, his cane folding up and going into a pocket. “And you can lead!”

“That will make sure we don’t run into adventures?”

“Probably,” he says, quite seriously.

I shake my head and we walk slowly down streets, Jay peppering me with questions about everything I can see, and my asking questions about bindings he’s sensing in turn as we make plans to meet the magician for supper and I do my best to convince him that just hanging out for a nice, quiet afternoon is all the birthday present I could want.

I suspect it won’t stop him from wanting to get me another ‘gift’ next year, but I can hope.

3.

“We need to talk.”

I look up from gently using magic to massage old stones as Charlie glowers at me. “About?”

“My birthday. You. Jay. You sicced him on me with ideas about gifts he could get me. And you do nothing without having ulterior motives, magician.”

I smile. “You say that word in ways Jay never would.”

“And I’m wrong in this?”

“No.” I pull the magic back. “Jay is flexing his nature more. Testing the world, feeling the limits of it and pushing against them. I wanted some idea of how far he’s let himself grow.”

“Let?” She says warily.

I try on the shape of a smile. “You remember Oregon.”

“The attempted invasion into the universe from Outside?”

“I called forth a Power with the universe to aid us.”

Charlie shudders, the god within her withdrawing even from the memory. “It was – big. I try and forget what I saw but I can’t.”

“It was Time, or at least an approximation of It.” I shove my hands into my pockets. “Jay is kin to that kind of power, Charlie. Potentially even greater, for all anyone knows. You’ve seem something of what Else he is.”

“Yes. It was – large. Strange. He was terrified I would be scared of him.”

“He doesn’t know what he is. Not yet. I don’t think he’ll let himself know. Nothing with the potential he has should even be able to enter the universe, Charlie. But he is here, and our friend, and we must deal with that as best we can.”

“By testing him?”

“If we have to.” I walk back toward the RV. “As we need to.”

“That’s not safe at all,” she says softly.

“Few worthwhile things are wholly safe,” I say, and the answer is a glib magician’s one that she doesn’t question at all.

Facebook status updates part XXXVII (July 2015)

If fimbulwinter is what precedes Ragnarok then perhaps more greenhouses gasses are a good thing?

“Only small people fear small things.”

Once upon a time, someone told me that madness was doing the same thing over and over, but now I know that isn’t true: madness is doing what you know you shouldn’t do and being desperate enough to do it anyway.

“I found something I shouldn’t have.”

“That is the start of many great stories. And tragedies too, I imagine.” Kes chuckled, the sound soft and bubbly.

“I think you trust autocorrect more than you trust me.”

You are my control, my alt, even my delete key.

Some days the parking lot cried over how empty it was at night. No one noticed, even if there were more cracks in the asphalt to be fixed than the city had budgeted for.

Joe replaced his personality with a series of tattoos.

Reasons I could never be vegan: having to tell everyone I meet that I was a vegan would take up too much time.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t hire you. You only have 1 star reviews on AmazonLife.”

He started the interview process for all potential hires by introducing them to his assistant, a red sockpuppet named Sparkie that conducted the first half of the interview.

They said it was cultural appropriation when the older generation began to mimic their slang in a post-emoji world.

You asked how I survived, but I was wearing armour rather than armor, and the extra letter was all the kevlar I needed.

“They say that X marks the spot but won’t tell you Y.”

I kept trying to find a way to tell you, unable to finds words in our own tongue. No matter that our tongues were not strangers, that we were often so close as to be one. But I had deleted your Twitter account by accident, and could not bring myself to share so deep a truth.

So I understand, I think, why you never told me about your affair.

“I have to hide my poetry in prose, or they will never take me seriously at all!”

“You’re writing a technical manual on how to use a digital camera. You can’t expect to win a Pulitzer with that, not even if you hide an epic poem in it.”

“You never know. You never know. I’d settle for the Carnegie Medal.”

I opened the door of my closet a crack, just to see if you were waiting on the other side.

“When we said that the community was going to be mixed-use, we meant that poor people were not going to be part of that mix.”

“I was tired of never getting caught,” was all the bank robber said in his interview despite the press demanding to know how he had been given a four million dollar golden handshake despite seeing the banks profits plunge by 45% during his tenure as CEO.

I filled the silence with pregnant pauses and dangling ellipses

“I think I am in love with just how much I hate you.”

“Yes, I do know you can, ah, transform into bacon, ham, and sausage, but I am afraid that it is NOT a superpower, Mr. Pig”

“Ah, the teapot you gave me has no handles on it. I was wondering why?”

“Didn’t you read the script on on the bottom?”

“No, I –.Truth? You named a teapot?”

“You can’t handle the truth!”

“… I think I am about to throw it at your head.”

Sometimes life just throws the most awful sucker-punches right at us. And the only thing we can do is find a way to get back up, even if sometimes we don't see why we spend the effort...

If you could be one button on a microwave, which button would you be?

I don’t know love could be counterfeited until I met you.

Did you know that nothing is ever counterfeited because! you can’t fake something without knowing the true thing too :D

Proposed yoga pose: frowning cactus.

“Will you be my frenemy?”

“That’s not how most people ask someone out for a date.”

“I’m just trying to be honest about how it may end.”

Clinging to fading glories as though they were morning ones, we plant seeds in the ground as if a garden might sprout. We talk about wonders with voices choked raw with nostalgia and we forget our great dream was another’s nightmare, or how many steps backward we took for every one we staggered forward. We keep pretending we have so much to offer as though the future ever needed us at all.

Imagine if your life was really divided into chapters. All the ways in which you’d dread the cliffhangers.

“I am so scared of how much I need you.”

“You’ve never said that to me before.”

“Sorry. I was talking to my frappuccino.”