You are the simple existence woven into itself to keep us from falling. You ask me all these questions, all these falsehoods in an attempt to quicken the storm under my lapel. You do not relax, ever. Continuity became a second language to you, and on the day she died; I swear, the day she died; you didn’t cry, you just became more content with the silence around you and did not beg. You sit back on your bindings when we talk, and stare into me, then through me, as if I’m glass that remains unbroken yet continues to bend. I am convinced, observing you without a price that you are a strange thing, over-lapping the creases in your own skin with a smile like war and eyes that pierce the thinly veiled world you refuse to admit to me. I can see something, nothing, all of it—and you can’t stop switching between these versions of yourself.


The landscape is not a swamp but is a wetland of fruitless vine and tortured, over-stated monition, full of tall birds and taller trees of many darker colours. The canopies don’t lie when they offer shade, they say: This sun is hot.


The sky is in a constant twilight, ever regressing now dusk and evening into a ripple of shadows between us. The deep indigo lapsing itself off the serpentine shoreline echoes a reminder of the sea, of you—I know this world well.


But at night, while all the silence wakes and every creature dreams effortlessly, we sat on the grassy crest over-looking your heart—we knew, although I had a hunch otherwise, this world was you.