What Is All This?

I miss her. Is there anything else to say?

Twilight miss me when I’m gone, bleed my shadow ‘til it’s grown.

Light don’t follow where I go, my face anew you’ll never know.

Why do they call my brother a genius, when he cannot comprehend kindness? When his tongue is tied in any conversation but his own?

Why is the emotional intellect of the women in the room discarded? So often shamed out of me any desire to share myself, my thoughts, upsetting my family feels like embers landing on every inch of skin searing me to silence. The boy gets to be a boy his entire life. The girl has to be a woman the moment he enters the room.

You killed my chicken.

Your digital chicken. It’s a game Heather.

You killed my chicken. And didn’t apologize.

It wasn’t on purpose.

You didn’t apologize.

It’s not a real chicken.

You didn’t apologize.

I’m not apologizing for killing a fake chicken in a fake world. It’s not real babe. It’s just a game, please stop acting crazy.

Don’t call me babe when you don’t care about my feelings. You killed my pet in the game and didn’t say sorry. Even when I’ve expressed it so openly that this matters to me.

It shouldn’t! That’s the whole point. This should not be a big deal it’s pixels on a screen!

You’re being disrespectful.

You’re being insane! Get over the bloody chicken!

I’m done.

Thank god.

With us. With this. You don’t take anything that I care about seriously. You’re so above it all.

You’re breaking up with me over a stupid fucking chicken?!?

I’m breaking up with you because you’re mean. If you killed it and said you were sorry, everything would be fine. You choose to act like a dickhead over so many little things like this and I’m tired of it. You try to convince me not to care about something instead of caring about it with me.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

This isn’t the first time you’ve done this. Remember the cat puzzle?

Oh how could I forget the stupid cat puzzle.

Even now you get so incredibly upset whenever I’m upset about something. You try to shut me down before I can express I’m unhappy. According to you, I’m not unhappy, I’m just crazy for no reason!

You said it, not me.

Oh, goodbye Dereck. Goodbye.

This won’t bring the chicken back! You’re such an idiot.

Right.

One day I’ll be old, and teenagers will record me doing mundane tasks with my wife in public, and post it somewhere, on an app with a name I don’t know, appreciating #humans being humans. Appreciating how adorable old people are like we’re rabbits in a wooded glade or something, never thinking they’ll be me, holding the hand of their partner, helping her step from the street to the sidewalk with weary bones and wrinkled faces. One day I was them, and one day they will be me. Though I’ll never know their names or faces, they will have taken a moment of my life as their own as a relic of humanity, though for me, it is just a slice of my morning commute. I wonder if I’ll feel the camera on my back then. I wonder if I’ll wish I was the recorder and not the recorded. I wonder how many likes the essence of my self and my life would get, as a moment of my life is turned into an online commodity by a stranger.

Sometimes when I have a dream, I feel entirely refreshed of my old perspectives. I see everything brand new, as if I’m a different person. What relief. I know now why our minds wander in the fields of the twilight hours. To abandon the stagnant pond misery we wade in and remember possibility, endless as always.

I’m trying to hold onto myself.

Rushing water.

I can’t remember what I came out here for.

Rain coming down.

I wonder if my mascara is running.

Wind pushing.

But I can’t bother to wipe my face if it is.

The black beetle lies on its back, stomach burning by the tips of the sun’s low hanging fingers. I flip him over with my broom four times, and he can’t manage to stay upright. It could be the wind knocking him over, or the cracks in man made stone unfamiliar to his nature bound feelers. Or it could be that he just wants to die and I have to let him.

I can’t explain the joy I feel. And isn’t that so wonderful isn’t that so perfect to have a problem doppled in sugar and cherries with pits you suck on until they are bare in your mouth.

Ode to the Red Boy

I see a red boy winking, perpetually still. His right eye is closed, his left open, unmoving. He wears pajamas, the Spiderman kind my brother used to wear when he was small. The red boy is on the floor of a hospital in Gaza, his blood caked on his face with soot and ash. His chest does not rise and fall, his eyes do not blink, but he holds his wink. One eye shut, the other open. A playful gesture, as if he's playing a trick on me. As if soon he would awaken and wash the red from his face like strawberry jam, and go play with his spider-man figurine in the sunlight. But he does not move, the red boy. The fluorescent light holds him still. His swollen eyelid does not so much as twitch. He is determined to fool me, and I am happy to be fooled. If it means he will one day wake up, I am happy to be fooled.