50 years left. 4 more hours until sunset. Still I'm gonna take my time getting there. Get lost in eddying moments. Fall into my unconscious, into sleep-walking, weaving in-and-out throughout.
"We are the same person," I had said, smiling. I was very touchy last night.
Ace talking about sending postcards that never arrive.
"I love that they get lost in the ether," she had said.
Saying everything we longed to say, everything they longed to hear. It was in that letter.
Alicia is telling me about the sheep tattoo Josh just got. A little box with three holes poked in it.
"Dessinez-moi une mouton svp," il dis.
The letter that never arrives, the sheep in the box.
When we all kissed it felt like theater of love. Maybe just for me. Everyone seemed grounded in their bodies. Arriving to the moment, lips and tongue and saliva. Chapstick making its rounds. Kennel full of cats with no one washing their hands in-between pets. Tension unraveling. Big bottle spinning between us. Remembering I hadn't been kissed since, June? And, even then, was that kissing? Was this kissing? Kissing being love, and love being something trickling out in myriad ways. Part of it.
Love for me is that oneness, that agreement of oneness. There's this big love I'm in right now, my body like one of those blow-up turkey decorations in the front-lawn. Cumbersome and lofty. I carry them with me. I don't feel separate. I wrote a list of those people, but even then, it feels bigger. The way you're dreaming of your mom but it's also your best friend and boss and the barista and the kid in the second grade.
We're peeling potatoes and I want to go instagram live. I love the things that take time, and I want to capture them. I want others to see them, and I want others to make them. It's like that Norwegian slow-tv movement. The shipping barge along the sound. Slowly moving by people dancing on the shore. We're peeling potatoes talking shit about mean children we've met in out time. Camera pans out. Taking in the entire picture. The roof. The clouds. Slow-life. Staying grounded, undemanding. Peeling the potatoes over the same bowl felt more intimate than the kissing.
It's the theory-of-forms, glimmers of shadow in the torchlight and I actually don't need to see any clearer. Blinding light of the sun beyond the clammy walls. The implications are sufficient. What's that thing they say in the spy-movies? "Enhance, ENHANCE." Until you can see the license plate and the blood type and the ovarian cyst and the first heartbreak and the perfect strand of silver hair.
For some reason I squint to unfocus my eyes. I want to see less, feel more. I'm still collecting data, just a as vigilant as the nerd in the white van hunkered over a laptop.
Josh sent me an mp3 through text yesterday.
I never tear into packages. Three holes sufficient to peek in on the perfect sheep. Existing in the cool shadows, "look he's fallen asleep."
He's been sending me poems and I absolutely cherish them, and listen to them over and over and over.
"Love beginning means return." A tidal pool, a "querying wave," a nebulous gesture we don't probe or ask why. It's exactly what I want to hear. It's the next clue. It's announces the next act.
I have four hours until sunset and I'm still gonna take my time. I've got forty years until, what? Sunset?
"One day," you said to me, "i watched the sunset forty-four times!"
When you die, you can't see sunsets," Hayao Miyazaki had said.
"Maybe you BE sunsets," Kim had said, "And enjoying the sunsets in this body with this spirit on this day is *emoji of chef's kiss*"
I turn to you while the sun sets. It's not the sunset, it's your face watching the sunset I wanted to see. I wanted to see your thoughts quiet, lost in nostalgia of some other sunsets you've woven together throughout your time. We haven't been counting, haven't been keeping score. Your softness and serenity. Another day getting lost in the myriad.
"Name three memories," I would never interrupt. We stay quiet. I want to ask you something, but don't.
An unopened package. A vague shape. Whatever I am, it's the myriad. It's all the kisses. It's all the unsaid words. Letters that don't arrive.

"You still doing pages?" I text Tyler.
"Yeah! Missed one day cause of work super early but going strong. You?"
October 6th we started. I've been doing them longer I guess. Little morning exercises laid out by Julia Cameron. They're sweet. Sometimes I write about nothing, usually coming from a place of ascending from the unconscious. Dream echos. Trace of spaces moments before inhabited. And I write about what I want without overthinking it. Not quite in the place to remember limitations. Embraced by the possibilities of the morning. Reminding myself of the story, the rhythm, the narrative. Where we left on the character arc, what plot-point are we exploring today? I'll get unrealistic. Things I couldn't think at the end of day rife with a million small disappointments. My morning-self so optimistic, lulled.
I yawned at work the other day. "Don't do that," my coworker Josh told me, "are you tired?"
I told him I was calm. That I yawn when I'm calm. Later another coworker told me I looked tired.
"This is just how my face looks now. I'm older. I'm not tired, I'm just settled."
The sleepy morning writing grounds me in something I haven't been able to put into words. It follows me throughout the day.
I mull long, drawn-out fantasies, sleep-walking, keeping to myself. I don't wind up as easily, an uncomfortable feeling, so I'm grateful. On a run to the top of Pilot Butte yesterday I counted by breaths, not my steps. Steps were too fast, it was making me anxious. As labored as my breathing was becoming it was more relaxing to count my inhales and exhales. We're working in longer units now, as a means of survival.
We're taking things page by page.