Bryan’s come home and I’m still awake, sitting dark swathed in marijuana smoke. This place feels like I should know it, they’ve been living here three years. Catching up is interesting, it’s sweetness to be here, to talk late with Bryan, the closest I came to an older brother. We remember each-other, our words, our echoes. We don’t like the house they built on the ruin of where I used to live, but I know in his own way, he doesn’t know how to listen to me. From the speakers flow low music, songs entangled with too much emotion. It’s distracting, though required tonight. My heart isn’t here, it’s elsewhere. It’s tangled in long dark hair. My mouth spouts facts and truths and history rebounded on automatic, engaging without finding myself in the words. My tongue knows I’m in the wrong place, that this isn’t the time. I would tell myself that I shouldn’t have come, but I know my physics better than that. I know my orbit wouldn’t have changed, that I’m still falling always inward at the same distance. I wonder if this is a step toward accepting the mantle of adulthood, this continuing in spite of things, but it’s just always been here, part of my frame. I understand something is happening. I understand that it’s out of my control.
Take comfort that some of the fear is mutual. We are savage flowers, bleeding at the roots, utterly convincing.