When the night comes, I can see you wrap your hands together in the darkness. Your grip is loose and thoughtfully gentle. It seems a heavily practiced gesture, though it always requires substantial imagination. And you can pretend we’ve both just fallen asleep like that, as if always. At some point, inventing was all our bodies seemed able to do. Our voices became torn out, edited, and disputably false. We were precise and dishonest in every word, in our choices, in our inauthentic way to make unraveled threads into a comfortable living space. The weight from this has made uneven fragments from history. Chapters of stories get shredded into moments, which blur into feelings, eventually evaporating into this barren vacuum. You said the hardest part for you were the failures – the running up, into, and through the walls of my insecurities.

You put your hand on my shoulder and you said, “Where do these walls come from?”

And I thought, They’ll fall right on top of you.