After everything was over, we did not go back to who we were.
Before we were dancers, we were just bodies moving in the dark,
confetti spilling from our glossed lips, and before that, we
drank bitter liquor drenched in cherry and lime and
earlier, before that, we drank milk, both of us.
Far away as those days seem now, we were small once.
Galaxies crashed and stretched and shook their dust out everywhere but
here we are, in the same life somehow.
I will always be in awe of that, a hairline coincidence we slipped through,
just like I will always be in awe of you, how you can
kiss me and never fall in love. How we can keep good things perfect,
like the moment the light from a new star finally
makes it to our sky, years after the first burst and
no one knows how long they’ve been waiting for the light to turn on,
or no one notices that this star wasn’t here last night. We go on
pretending everyone knows how bright we really are.
Questions stay in strangers’ mouths but we still get the answers
right, every time. We have nowhere else to be and
someday, that will not be true. Someday, we will be busy and boring but
tonight, I am everyone I have ever been, and you see that,
under the glitter and over the music and all of the other
voices, singing and hoping to end up where we are, but
we are somewhere impossible. The map to us ends with an
X and starts so far before then, but you don’t want to talk about that.
You want to build a lifetime of this moment,
zoom in and uncurl, and I want to let you.
The Los Angeles Press 