Hallow

Like animals, we spend a lot of time watching each other. I have wings and you prefer the ground, the lush undergrowth. One day I fell out of my tree and invited you to follow me back up. You are not yet at home in my untidy nest, full of the shiny, glittering things I am always bringing in. I am a mystery for you to unravel slowly, strand by strand. You want to watch me put on mascara and blow-dry my hair in the morning. You can’t figure out if I am large or small. You search my body for some kind of map to tell you about what is inside. This nautical chart is invisible. Turn left after the island where the cedar trees grow sideways and upward out of the cracks in the stone. Disregard the lighthouse; its light is too tiny and there is no one home anyway. Proceed slowly and with great caution through narrow Ragged Rock Channel. Remember that there are many ways of getting lost, and many ways of getting to any particular place. Keep an eye out for shoals hiding just beneath the surface.

Your hands move over and over from my ribcage to my hip bones to the flesh of my hips and back to my ribs and, stitch-browed, you sigh.

You have a lot of questions.

Things I am afraid of include poverty, the dark, rejection, humiliation, deep water, and most people.

My heart keeps beating too fast. Someone should make me sit still. I imagine my stomach shrunken, a tiny bird cage inside of me. I could be hollow. I can hear the blood pulsing in my eardrums. I can’t sleep either and I wonder what I am returning to, or what I could become. Lighter, willowy, feather. Small enough for you to hold onto. Invisible so you can’t find me.

I am letting you trick me.

You could be the one in the dream.

This early stage of enamoredness is very familiar to me now; I have this idea that we are both made of color and light, flames and oceans, that we can only cause each other to become even more lush and luminous, like some kind of crazy flower no one has ever heard of before.

This time. It has to be this time.

I want to tell you to not worry. I want to tell you that I am already there.

Underneath me is a lot of ground and even more water, deep water, endless glacial canals, deep water filling the space between stones. There is no map to inside you, either. You have to make it up as you go along. Like any haunted body of water harboring a bewildered sailor, I will my undercurrent to steer you in the right direction. You will not be lost. Just pay attention.

Those creatures, though - I can’t be held responsible for them. They swim against me, sinuous, rippling, pressing. They spin me into storming.

My heart will move too slowly from now on. It tries to act like yours, stretches and snaps back between beats, a caterpillar engaged in a constant game of catching up with itself. You can hear it in the music I can’t stop listening to. Melancholy, synthesized, rhythmic, dense and opulent, soaring sad voices through minor tones. A sort of complacency in desperation. Like I need something beyond myself to bury inside me. The shining anchor dragging the sea floor.