You’ve been led to believe that your lovers are just a collection of infinite verbs, used for predicting the weather. One of them says, “Your way of living is backward, your imagination, voyeuristic.” Their body hasn’t changed over the years, if anything, they’ve become even more attractive.
Another recalls the middle of the night with the cadence of their speech. And not just any night either, but the only night you can remember. A burst of light shimmering from their direction encourages a general shift in climate patterns.
Still another isn’t a lover at all, but some transitional spirit who eggs you on into performing humiliating acts of self-sabotage. When you get together, summery days suddenly ensue. Their lips are tinted blue and suggest a language that has not yet been invented.
They tell you, “There are writers who enrich language and then there are writers who don’t write.”
What do they do? They steal. They dally over the rough edges of corpses. Some skim stones across flat surfaces. Others choose the imaginary life of high-fibre diets and the comforting weight of coins.
You say, “I’m sorry to be so vague.”
But what is one to do? The narrative calls for pleasing inputs and skin on skin contact. It calls for compatible file formats and instinctive conjugation. You can fill in the form and enjoy the happiness of human interaction or you can ignore the form and live off the grid.
There are only two possibilities. Possibility#1: None of this ever happened at all. In which case, the words in your mouth shall never be removed. Possibility #2: It was all you could do to not swim out beyond the breaking ways, towards a distant horizon. It was all you could do to keep from floating.
