Elsewhere (Published in The Wallflower Magazine)

I can see a murky place unwinding through dreamland. Curling avenues extending ahead through a wide courtyard, where a cafe is now waiting. I can see you there, a portrait, a luminate angel in streaks of moonlight. Orange and yellow paintings hang around you— a look of fey warmth from all angles. It’s dark, save for the lights which suspend themselves in midair around your table, and those vacant seats that are closest to you. Outside, under the awning, red ocean sounds come pouring up from the shoreline. 

I know the ocean must be close. It stains your fingers as you lift a cup to your lips— and your lips are suddenly all I can make out amidst a violent fit of blindness. Just your cup and the lips that drink fondly some coffee or flower tea. So the ocean then passes up the opportunity to crash, instead spilling itself into the courtyard where you sit. It comes churning through the dark stone and pools around at your ankles. All those hovering lights begin to now reflect themselves and a halo has created itself only for you. Lights, changing always, and a shimmering fire, and violet night, all cast in the perfect mold of your figure. It is as though the world cannot help but collect itself around you. I am no different. 

I have been sitting aside, separate in the eaves. A friend of mine has just left, or perhaps I was alone and merely imagined them. Even if they were real, I’m sure I wasn’t listening to a word they had to say. I have been killing myself slowly, dragging myself across hot coals, or otherwise considering the prospect approaching you and simply saying Hello. This thought has been keeping me from breathing— taking all the air and all the warmth from me. The seawater has not chosen to pool around my legs—has actually come up just short. Stupidly, fleetingly, I wonder if, by slipping my hand into the water, I might feel some distant shock, transferred from you to me. 

You are reading, I can see it, in the reflections playing near your eyes. You are reading some thick, leather bound book, and it is nearly over. You set the book down, and I am panicked, for you are now looking at me instead. You’ve spotted me easily, and I can’t imagine how. I thought, truthfully, that I made for an uninteresting person, nothing but a shadow’s unhappy companion– but you’ve spotted me.

I decide to sit across from you, under the awning, and all the water separates where my feet land. I can touch only hard, dry, stone, and you cross your legs into the waves, as if to show off. I am not jealous—could never think to be. Instead I think I am transfixed, how you move through murmuring golden pools. 

You are speaking a language I do not understand. It is something soft, and flowery, and yet with every syllable there is cinnamon afterbreath, a trace remnant of the foreign star that you come from. It is a language that blurs like snow—that constricts and expands in sweeping motions. You are speaking to me, and I cannot possibly understand. Underwater, I might hear you better—might be able to discern the melody of your thoughts. Instead, I am struck dumb, mute, gaping without a hope of explaining myself. 

A passing covey of hummingbirds arrive overhead, and spin off towards the waiting sea. Somehow this only makes me frustrated. I want desperately for you to understand me. I want desperately to tell you that these birds make me think only of you—that, in fact, bronze statues, and cold air makes me think of you. I think that I could make you understand, if only I could begin to decipher the language. Yet, it is like I cannot even produce the sounds you are making—the wondrous ringing of windchimes in the dead of night. 

I was better off waiting around in the dark, I think. Then I could have stalked off into the night and drank a great deal to try and forget you. It would all be unsuccessful, I suppose. I would have just ended up seeing you in triplicate—in every lovely thing piercing me the way your eyes are piercing me now. I would have sat by the sea, and mourned the moment, several long hours ago, when I did not approach your table. 

So, it is, after all, better that I am making myself look foolish in front of you—Better than the sinking, awful, alternative. Even if I am twisted up and stretched thin trying to mimic your wilting words, I am better off here than anywhere else in the world. 

Your words fall through me—scattered into prisms that rebound upwards through my lungs. And your eyes have not left me–-haven’t wavered. I am at equal moments, in tortured need of them, and yet so terribly afraid they will not see anything at all. If I could speak the language, I’d tell you all of this. If you could see me trying, I’m sure you would know. You would know that I have seen you in this place each and every night, sitting under this awning, as you are. 

I cannot imagine what about this night is so different—why this night you have closed your book—why this night you have looked up and discovered me. I don’t know why I didn’t run, and why I am now in your presence. I don’t even know my own name, or yours. So much is vaporous and unformed and gauzy, yet, in this light you are realer than anything at all.

I will wake with your words drifting out of an open window, and I will run to snatch up any that I can use. Next time I will have learned to say Hello. Next time, I will impress you and you might smile. Perhaps you will find some time to teach me— How to say all the words I want desperately for you to hear.