After the equinox

Your words chilled the air into crisp sheets, asking me to fold the origami swans that you deserved more than anyone, with flashes of farewells folded across creases designed to look all too familiar through apple eyes looking down cider horizons like flowers blooming in the fall, a miracle not exempt from dissonant dreams trying to tell stories time would never tell, tales of two ill-fated travelers who crossed the stars themselves.

Standing in the ceiling

Our regrets still pull me out of the surf bubbling without hooks, like your echoed laugh and its full-time job as a motivational speaker without self-interest, its reckless enthusiasm swaddling even my most forgone dreams in holey blankets and hallmark cards, but even if we didn’t get well soon, I remember that one day when your sick voice tuned lower and I heard my leading tones; the resulting piece, for solo piano (for two hands, two voices), a different song than the one you sang when you asked me to walk home with you in front of our friends, which I remember when I see your name on my phone when you can’t help it every few months.

All the time we spent in the absence of confessions coalesces into a ladder to a wormhole to an apartment attic, one I can only visit when wondering if we still think the same things, in the same order, all while preparing to forget we ever did.