I am often not who I think I am. When I was in 6th grade I counted birds out of the bus window on my way to school. I dreamed about flying as much as falling from high places.
Today the lunch lady smiled back when I said: "thank you".
Today, the music resonated from the cardboard speakers like a tired bee and became little more than my miracle.
He is a flash of wild hair and flailing arms and freedom that washes away down the white hallway, flooding every imprisoned brick with electric orange.
If he was a paint color his name would be "Awake".
I wanted to join him. I wanted to find joy in simplicities, like cafeteria music on a Monday afternoon.
He probably used to count birds too. He has already become my lighthouse.
The vacant high school lobby knows nothing but her index finger and the way it hurriedly traces the second hand around the face of her watch.
She only needs more time. She only has the window glass as her ocean.
She calculates the jagged loops of her echoing voice into exhaustion: "How much sleep can a person get when they only know how not to sing?"
She is kerosene for the flame; breaths for the ideas that start moments. She is aware of her mute contribution. She sits feebly in the center of the lobby and closes her eyes like the world no longer wants to see them.
He is a river and the moment when the crayon on the sidewalk melts under the pressure of the sun.
He has never told me so but I am aware that he sings and follows trains down their receding tracks. He chases after whatever possibility taps him on the shoulder.
"There is never too much laughter." I'm not sure it's true because my striped socks start to peel at the edges when I can't breathe during math class and the quiet girl who sits behind her past friend on the bus rarely similes when the radio turns on.
His eyes in the morning are golden. They make me long for toast with honey and a westward facing window with no curtains.
You used to collect chasms in glass jars and verses under your bed. You used to smile at me. You were phosphorescence and I couldn't wash you off; I didn't want to. For all the times I refused to talk you never gave into writing on the walls with crayons or charcoal or your own tears. I used to stand in front of a mirror and hold myself, just to see what it looked like. I never saw you do the same but I dreamed about it- the way your hands curled around your shoulders, the way your forehead tucked helplessly into the nook of your elbows, the way your eyelashes became damp with the possibility of ocean dust. You are the inexplicable boy I leave poetry for. You are the person I am asked about by familiar strangers in the refrigerated section of the grocery store: "Who is he and why did you let him go?". I wonder what would've happened if you'd told me, that day on the riverbank, that you write let-go letters too.
