I Knew You Then (V)

There are a limited few who’ve left the hold of gravity, who’ve been jettisoned into the great abyss of space, and lived a separate lifetime away from the friction and resistance that complicates everything on the surface of terrestrial bodies. They’ve experienced a different existence. It is hard upon their return, to leave that behind. Often, there is a dizziness and a vertigo that makes it seem as if the planes of their existence are overlapping and the disorientation makes it difficult for them to situate themselves where they are. They cling to the familiar in the echoes of the […]

I Knew You Then (IV)

There, in the dark, they talk. They are like the ocean and the seashell, their whispers filling the space of the room, catching the scant refractions of lost light. In their whisperings they agree and disagree, having lived two completely separate lives to this point, their perspectives are just a hair from parallel. She can see what he sees and yet cannot see it quite the same. Yet there is something in the narrative, there, in the dark, after the projection of it, that pulls them both but not quite the way they are pulled toward each other. [The gravity; […]

I Knew You Then (III)

They sit. Both of them. Together.  They sit on the couch, caught in the television glow, as the score quickens its pace and swells. There’s that sense that they should have always existed within the same boundaries of space and along the same timeline making its winding trajectory through myriad possibilities. They haven’t. They sit here now. [This moment]. The moment fills with the odd sensation, or rather it is his heart, which is what makes it seem as if it is the moment, that he’s always known her, that on some level they have always been connected the way […]

I Knew You Then (II)

Falling back into the space which still holds his form, onto the pillow which still hasn’t forgotten the curvature of his head. He breathes in deeply and closes his eyes a little longer. Life continues beyond moments and beyond dreams. If only we could construct brackets around the best of these and exist there within them without care for what came before or what follows [here is what stands out most and what you’ll remember]. There is no way he could return to sleep in the brief time he has left, but he imagines that he could and attempts to […]

Plastic Barrel (I)

The sunlight floods through the rear window, the brown tinged liquid inside the little plastic cylinder becomes washed out. The hand holding the syringe becomes a bleached out silhouette. There’s a sudden infusion, crimson. It dances with the rust colored liquid, swirling around and reaching to the top of the barrel, toward the plunger. Then it all vanishes into a vein. The belt hangs off the arm, like in the movies. The car sits on Figueroa under the overpass north of Temple. This is Los Angeles. Downtown. This is the Los Angeles of my adolescence. The Los Angeles that no […]

I Knew You Then (I)

In the moon’s desaturated hues, the fall breeze frustratedly blows at the blinds causing them to tremble, and they lay there, their bodies intertwined, her head resting on his arm resting on the worn pillow. Her knee pressing against his inner thigh, as his leg gently presses and half pulls her closer to him. The comforter below them strewn and bunched up at its different ends. The thin blanket they’ve tossed upon themselves, barely covering anything, a kind of afterthought at the late hour. The moon’s light refracts off the pale walls filling the moments with an ethereal atmosphere. In […]

Finding Rest

-In the crepuscular moments, when silence stretches into absence, when fatigue and wakefulness wrestle on eyelids, when scant refractions of light unsettle shadows and cause them to shift creating apparitions and illusions of beings that never existed, that is where all the moments of the journey and its detours settle into the same monochrome. This is when the distinction between dreams and the dreamer fade and the evanescent glow of certainty ruptures completely. The pulsing driven by the metaphysical heart stills and scatters like the embers of fire. In the cooling breath of night when synapses lay barren and neurons […]

Trails

-The plane cuts the clouds above him. He wonders if she’s on it. He’s had the thought as many times as he’s woken past the midpoint of night, in the still dark, felt the cold of her absence, and searched the empty side of the bed for her ghost. He’d wake and drive down to the coast, listen to the planes moaning above, and wonder which would be the one that would bring her back. He’d sit there for hours, as the sunlight spilled upon the waves, and they continued rolling in, crashing and cascading. Some days he’d fall asleep […]

Trinket

– It was a kiss that saved her life. She would have never imagined such a thing was possible. There are few who would admit to believing in such a thing occurring. But it did. It did save her life. And it was a kiss, in some way. This light we have to see by is always shifting, as is the slippery nature of names. Such that when she was given this kiss, she would not have identified it as such. But he did. When he placed it in her palm and gently bent her fingers over it. He looked […]

Unique

– She was pregnant, at least, that’s what she said in the message she left you. Your immediate response, logically, was to add up the weeks since you last saw her, or more accurately, since you last copulated. She was the one who would always use euphemisms. She always hoped you would ‘make love,’ ‘dance in the sheets,’ ‘dance in the nude,’ or ‘join your bodies as one.’ To you, it was always just sex. Sometimes you wanted her more, sometimes you wanted her less. Sex, you always wanted about the same. You’d humor her. When she’d call it making […]