like cough syrup

I get convinced lately there is cough syrup running through my veins. Perhaps it’s the heat. It slows everything around you and I. I wind up lying in the backyard and counting stars in daylight. There are certain spaces carved out for your finger tips and I am surprised they still fit. If I could tell you anything, I repeat this saying, over and over again on my way to school. I spent weeks traveling around the neighborhood, cataloging all the different ways I would lay it down, equally and with good rhetoric. I try to get coffee with myself but she’s so busy this week. All of the lessons and the words this summer forced upon me feel tangled in my bike spokes. If I didn’t have photographs pressed between my finger tips I would have convinced myself none of this ever happened. I’d send letters but there is no where to send them to and that feels more apt than anyone could understand. I wake up tangled in sheets and think about the dreams you had where the fire crept over the hill, the hill where his aunt was buried and we watch prayer flags flick in the wind. Lately, I am most proud of the ways I can get around all by myself. It doesn’t seem like something to be proud of, but I am, and it is. Being alone, I imagine, might be just like being old where everything lives in memories and dances across the shadow walls like people in caves all tied up and talking on Plato. What if all of this is nothing more than projections, and all the real things are up there in the daylight we can’t yet see? I want to do nothing but dance in front of you in an afternoon that never ends. It is a very good thing summer comes around every year, again and again.