I sat there listening to the sound of choirs singing. The sway of their robes, the clank of the bells, the whisp of alter smoke. Incense. Intense. You will be in my home and I will leave it. I have left all the doors open for you to come in and raid me. To rape me in the night. How will I ever return?

How foolish I feel to have knelt beside you, to have held your hand and watched you cry, and known my own tears in your likeness. I was ready to return to you. I was ready to call you forever, to call you home. And now I'm standing square at the beginning once again.

It hurts to see your future with someone, to make plans, to visualize something all encompassing and beautiful. The stakes were too high, I wanted everything, you were too young, you didn't know what it meant, it meant everything and you took it all away. You asked for space and so I gave it. How do I board up the doors without the pain of driving every nail in. Without shutting out the light, without being branded as used and non-operable. Everything is teetering on the brink of something, and I want to put you away. It always hurts more when there is family. I have lost so much more than you. Isn't that always the way. Fuck me. Fuck my poor decisions. This is what I do every time. I guard people in my life and then I open myself up for the kind of loss that leaves me gutted and empty.

It was a beautiful day wasn't it. I got there too early, I rushed by in bright color, not able to disguise my excitement. I was enthralled with you from the beginning. It was the kindness in your eyes and that smile. It made me feel safe and seen so readily, it made me want to be honest. Honesty is a slippery beast in relation to the self, because it changes like memory. What am I in this moment, what identity am I claiming, who will light me up the way you have on this day? We walk for awhile, I don't know where you are leading me, already I am following, in ways that I have not with others. Even when I don't know where I am going, I find myself leading. Here in this new city I have learned to hold back, to walk behind, to trust when it comes to this. The sun is brilliance upon your face, it points out how blue your eyes are as if I haven't noticed you are like every woman I've chased, and every man I didn't think could exist. Already I have idealized you, this must be a symptom of loneliness... the desperation for connection. We come upon the museum and it has to be the most remarkable thing I've ever seen. We turn into curious children on hands and knees peering through glass at these endless jars and cases of dead creatures. How miraculous to see them up close. How telling of our current disconnection with nature, to be so fascinated and so touched by the delicate tendrils of flesh and bone that exist here. We are both tender and sweet in dynamic, we both show care, attention to detail, we tread lightly, and ask real questions proving intensity. Maybe this is why it makes it so hard to let you go. Because we had that day, and what it meant. It meant that I could be absolutely real and absolutely lovely in every moment in your likeness, because I felt mirrored. To see the mirror and know its two dimension and to look behind it and find someone is the most thrill any human being can experience. I'm convinced. We looked at every creature, every part, every hair and nail, every tool and parcel of bone, with a kind of fixed observation, reverence and solitude. We gave sacrament in those moments, thinking about death, thinking about what it meant to love those strange grotesque things people often turned away from. So much of it is vanity isn't it, because we likened those spectacles in jars, for their beauty and their ugliness, for their vulnerability and their trapped state. We talked about our families, both poor, both mother issues, your mother who talks at you for hours while you barely say a word, and mine, who cannot speak much even when I ask. Fatherless children. We are fatherless. Yours left and I left mine. The choice is coin like, flip it and find the other. We tell each other secret things. Deep things. The energy builds, now I'm left in wondering if I have put it on you and you just received it or if it was equal. I wanted to touch you, to be near you, it was maddening, we brushed up against each other the cilia of our skin the heat of subtle bodies, the allure intoxicating. It wasn't until we sat down in that bookstore and you read me your favorite Kafka story that I leaned my head near your shoulder, and you welcomed my craning neck to scratch my head like a dog. I wanted to be your dog. I wanted to be loyal to you, to wait at your feet. I'm so willing to be a dog aren't I?