im finally gonna do it. im gonna let myself think of you in the gutter heaps of rotted entrails from animals that never had a chance to live. memories of you will lance my flesh and drain the things i didn’t think were still in there. it’ll take me a long time and when i’m done there won’t be anything left but ice sculptures made from cold tears that’re shaped like your mother because it’s the only shape i remember. i remember how she used to dress me and shove handkerchiefs in my mouth and i would spit them out clean as snow, build grocery stores just for me but couldn’t give me a place to sleep, so i threw rocks at your window until you gave me a name that nobody else could pronounce. now i rest in hammocks pulled between skyscrapers, thousands of feet up in the air, and i get high on the lack of oxygen and use it to recode my bad dreams. i don’t have any bad memories anymore, just times you and me went to the mall and the mall cops didn’t beat us up too bad, like i mean the times where we were allowed to go huff the exhaust fumes from all the vending machines that were out of stock of everything except expired orange soda with too much caffeine. when i started to miss you i would go back there and i bought out every machine until they were all out of stock, i always drink one half through my nostrils and i always pour one out into the street for you. the aspartame makes it burn real good when it goes down and when it comes up again. i started doing gig work for the mall now that nobody comes there anymore, im in charge of fabricating environments that look convincing enough to take pictures of and sell to machine learning companies so they can know what the forest looks like, or what every different shape of ice sculpture drips like when it melts. lately i’ve been keeping my eyes closed and screaming at the walls to find my way around, but the structure keeps crumbling and i get lost in the wrong echolocations until i find my way back to one of the safe zones they made in the 90’s when everyone was worried about kidnappers. it’s not much, but it’s not a liar’s job at least and these days i’d pay money just to tell the truth.

you and me started walking a path together a long time ago and now i can’t see the dirt so good these days, you’re about 200 cubits forward now and your ghost can’t come up with conversation anymore. i try to throw rocks like im young and you’re a window, but the winds are too high and they just shatter some glass on the abandoned buildings. my feet are getting tired and i don’t think i’ll ever catch up to you, but i’d rather mix my blood into the dirt than let you think im a quitter, so i break out into a sprint, and it all goes white, like i’m a few thousand feet up lying in a hammock, darkness setting in, bad memories gone, only you in my dreams, only dreams left of you, waiting for my feelers to blank.

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