i just want you to know that i love you and im glad im here! deep down i know i dont ever wanna leave being here but i know it will be the best for both of us when i actually do! hurry up and come home! me and kitty are making sweet potato casserole just for you!!!  

And curvature downward, arch of swooping flight (feathered Goddess gifted towards sea), never to land but to speak in muted francophone leaflings, nested and gone, further downward, falling, falling.

Strangers that whisper good nite to each other, unknowing of what dreams shall await them both.  Perhaps there exists a realm wherein we haven’t to seek for it is sought and shaped into our reality, our dreams.  Perhaps there is a balance between us sentient, dreaming beings, the idealized contours of sculpted marble hands.  Perhaps, yes, perhaps, we will awake to a reality far closer to that which we had always hoped for, the triangulated forces that bear witness to a cosmic wish.  The undying prayers of a silent statue. 

And we learned that these roads lead nowhere. With the concrete, specificity of an intent, the driving force of uncertainty. With days that belonged to night, and mornings that woke only in our dreams. We departed from this life, taking our belongings in our grandfather’s suitcases and the smell of thriftstore dressing rooms. We longed for something beyond the border, beyond the horizon that peaked and blurred like an unfinished oil painting. We dripped and dripped till we were completely white again, untouched canvases that declared it’s incongruity with the world.

File me under afterthoughts, fill me in with charcoal stains.

they bought a ticket for each other.  runaway train, runaway train.  they made a mixed CD to celebrate their release from their own lives’: a dismissal that would bring them together as one.  they would play the songs over and over to themselves, even when they were apart, each with their separate ear phones and separate speakers, separate spaces that acoustically resembled their future in some way.  brought together they would bring out the best and the very worst in each other, loving and hating each other all the same.  they would finish each others’ sentences.  they would curse and joke in borrowed phrases from each others’ newly adopted language.  they would runaway, runaway.  from everything but themselves, everything but each other.  and this was love.  

and in each others’ pockets they would find question marks.  in fonts they could not immediately recognize.  the familiarity of sans serif, the curvature that would align with the anatomy of memorized touch.  braille skin, the scars that shaped adolescence into the sculpted remnants of this present-day self.  we were the artists of our own creation.  our love was the final product, the ultimate culmination that resulted from the entirety of our artistic endeavors.  they spoke in such unnecessary eloquence.  they placed themselves into the awkward forms of society’s arms, holding each other close and whispering good-nite’s and i-love-you-too’s into each other’s sleep.  when they awoke, they would find themselves uncomfortably in a new city, a place they called home, but only through a mouthful of uncertainty and selfishness.  they would chew on the edges of what they knew to be a newfound freedom, tasting out the texture of a self they sought through each others’ eyes.  

but this new city brought confusion.  it brought feathers.  it brought gutters full of dead city birds.  they first grew distant from themselves, and then, each other.  inevitability was a word that friends, 1500 miles away, would use to describe the next stage that would arrive in the two’s relationship.  these friends would patiently wait for one of them—or both of them—to come back, crying, heartbroken, wallet-broken, already having forgotten even the crossroads to the closest Denny’s that they used to frequent on late nights.  late night coffee was the food of their love, the sustenance that held the fragile pair together like gorilla glue.  so when things weren’t working out, they would bring coffee instead of kisses to those crying lips.  the comfort of caffeine and cigarettes.  

their friends were mostly right about inevitability.  it was the girl that came back.  the first time it was only yet a day shy of being a week away from their departure, and the girl suddenly reappeared in the city, as if she had never left at all.  it was a small fight.  just a trivial argument over something neither of them could remember an hour later.  and yet when re-contextualized into the environment of a new place, the meaning of small matters suddenly shifts and finds themselves more meaningful.  we mentally highlight different aspects of the same equations.  we solve things differently.  we miscalculate and overcompensate, all just to realign ourselves with this new place that we have found ourselves within.  and so she flew back.  feather tied to feather, gorilla-glued to her back, she set sail on confusion’s wings and found herself back home.  the original home.  in her mind: a million words faster than typewriter fingers.  faster than subtitles scrolling across the bottom of the screen.  words tied to words—feathered—flying across her mind, drawing out the debate of: original home vs. new home.  suddenly neither felt like home at all.  nowhere felt like home.  she wanted to return but didn’t know where.  she wanted coffee.  very strong coffee.  she wanted Denny’s.  she wanted that familiar fake smile from her favorite burn-out waitress Jennifer: already knowing they want coffee, already knowing what the need for coffee meant, already knowing too much of their lives than a stranger ever should.  

that was the first flight away from flight.  flight away from fight.  running away from running away.  nothing was ever enough for her.  she had to run, run, run from everything and everyone, using all the feathers she had ever collected, using all the gorilla glue from the bottle.  she would cover herself completely, the feeling of wind hitting our conscious mind, the way strong, hurricane winds can blow away everything from yards and parking lots, clearing our path from unnecessary debris.  like erasing doubt before making the jump.  like popping pills and dreaming, dreaming.  the way chemicals travel through our neuronal passageways, inviting dopamine and serotonin over for brunch.  daytime drugs are sometimes different from nighttime drugs, yet when confusion sets in it’s all the same.  

the second time was less dramatic.  less dramatic, more drugs.  inverse dichotomy.  second flight, same fight.  you know how you reach a certain stage in a relationship where every fight, no matter whether it’s about politics, race, gender, trans-gender, or the place of ketchup in the refrigerator, or the precise temperature of the air-conditioner—etcetera—it always feels like you’re fighting about the same thing.  the same thing.  so you fight, fight, fight, and you get the fights mixed up, so the correct placement of ketchup in the top compartment in the fridge door, all the way to the left, always to the left of the mustard (if there is any left dammit, we don’t even like mustard),  suddenly seems like the answer to the fight about the precise temperature of the air-conditioner.  and so fights are a mix-and-match, and no matter how random and in-appropos it may seem, every answer is a solution to every problem.  and you give yourself pep talks in fortune cookie dialect, smoking a cigarette in the bathroom, reciting these inane mantras over and over to yourself.  you start speaking in the third person.  you start writing emails to yourself just to get through another fucking day.  you self-medicate.  you cry when watching movies that are not remotely sad at all.  you sigh.  you sigh seven times more than usual, and you find yourself counting them.  you count everything.  you count how many cigarettes you smoke.  you count how many fights you two have in a day.  or, if it’s a bad day, in an hour.  you count the number of condiment packets you two have collected in the kitchen drawer.  you count the number of expired coupons.  the number of plastic bottles that create wondrous mounds by the washer/dryer, waiting to be taken to the recycle bin.  

the point is, that no matter how many times she ran away, she always returned to him.  oh, confused, feathered girl, where have you gone to this time?  he would say, and kiss her on the forehead, the hairline, and tell her how sorry he is.  they are always both sorry.  they are always both in love.  they are both liars and cheaters and wannabe’s and basketcases that are so wrong for each other in every way.  but they don’t care.  somewhere close, a couple of blocks away maybe, there is a screeching followed by a crash, a car crash, and they both just look into each others’ eyes.  there is the sound of water.  her fear, her love.  the sound of broken radiators and neighbors talking loud on their cellphones on their balcony.  birds.  feathers.  the sound of feathers.  when they sleep they both dream of running away, from each other, from this life.  we love what is close only to want so badly to get away from it in the end.  we love because that is the only thing we can do.  we love because we are born to do so, because we truly believe we can.  we love the thing that will destroy us in the end, that will break our hearts and open them.  dissect them on steal, metal tables and scientifically analyze their components, tearing them apart.  and we will never regret our love, even if it has broken us, left us all alone, left us wanting for more.  and we will always run away.  we will always dream of running away.