these rooms

I don’t really know what is going on as of late. It feels like someone has built apartments inside my head. I keep on visiting different ones and find the information, or the faces, sometimes textures and tastes, familiar in an unsettling but not surprising way and somehow also very new. New like the way things are new when you buy them and bring them home, but then a few days later they blend into everything else that was already there, and nothing stays new forever. Sometimes I’m scared of them. I look away because I don’t want to see what they’re holding or I cover my ears because I don’t want to hear what they’re yelling. Sometimes I want to come in and lie on their shag carpeted floors and smoke a joint and play records and pretend like you still live around the corner in the tree house with the pool and the tiled yellowed floors. Then, I think about waking up in the mornings and wandering over, coffee in my hand. On the way there was a smaller white house, set back from the street and in its yard grew these massive flowers, they were white with larger yellow centers, so large, as large as my hands, they looked like a sunny side up fried egg but they moved in the morning wind. And you would be in your tree house and the music would trickle out the screen door and down the stairs and through the branches of the willow tree, and you would be cooking, and you never wore pants and your perfect tan thighs in the kitchen looked like you’d been cut from a magazine. I would sit at the counter. I cannot tell you now what it was for all those years we spoke of, but I am sure there was always something to be said between us. Does it all feel like a dream to you like it feels like a dream to me? Those years and all that sun and all that time. Did we know it then how easy it was to be us?

But you are not in every room. Though I wish you were.