Chance, an another

I chanced upon you in the strangest of places: the blanks in the plastic of a forgotten text message that led me to a skatepark. You grind to the deep end, elbowing out the thin air. I wasn’t your soulmate or the friendly recipient, I was merely a threshold when you slid down to enter yourself. A doorway becomes whatever it turns to, so I became a bit more of myself, and you a bit more of a float, or whatever’s the bounciest thing about you. Gold pure as a feeling fills up the lacunae as your body gets dotted with soft bulletholes, the weight of the wordiness gradually trimmed to a gulf. When you skidded away, I turned to the golden void with devotion. I ate only fish, rye bread and capers, I licked the dill sauce off the plate like an alleycat. I smelled my own body as if it were a bouquet, I played Fuck Me Eyes in my bedroom even before the album came out. I took every sunrise on an empty stomach as it wiggled away in the mighty pools of guttural acid, melting into mundanities. I spoke to my friends, I talked to the trees, I joked with my father and skipped reading Didion, not allowing the driest of rifles to sentence my sappy, wonderstruck heart to anything but sheer compensation. Truly, I wasn’t expecting a chance – not another – a chance with all the traits of a pop hit; lovestung and starbound, wide-eyed and banal, a song turned to prose turned back to a poem. Still that’s how it went, and that’s how it goes. See, when I was fifteen, I thought I’d have died by the time I turn thirty. I didn’t think you’d get it; your families, cities, your flags and your troupes have promised you a future. I was handed the future in the razor’s reflection by the oddest of odds, an ageless cloud of vapor turned into a teenager, their jewel-blistered palms shoveling open a crawling space, and here we are now; sitting in a snake-shaped emptied-out swimming pool, observing volcanoes, cradles and pyramids where there used to be islands. Nowadays neither of us smokes, but that’s the kind of conversation we’re having. I’m not as tall as I’d like, as serene as your squeeze or as motherful as your childhood; I’m not an Aquarian like you, but I’m as rebel-hearted, or at least enough to choose staying. What are the chances? you ask me.

(I might actually know, but never would answer.)