A box of eyes filled with macarons
1. I fell in love with a flash of gold that I’d only seen once or twice. I’d often glimpse its memory as I walked down the high street, or when I turned my head too fast in the evening light, or when I stared through the steam rising from my coffee. Black, black, black as the back of its head. Black like the light of the evening.
2. Last summer I spent my days in limbo at the airport, waiting for flights from here to there, to be suspended in mid air for countless hours but without my stomach in my throat. Once I bumped into an old teacher of mine, who used to teach me Lorca. He was eloping with his girlfriend. They were about to board a flight to Idaho. ‘What a bizarre place to elope’, I thought.
3. When I close my eyes I see that my imagination overflows with milk. Milky moonlight, milky sheets, milken tweth, lactose poetry. The Weatherman used to send me milk carton carcasses and velvet mourning. I still think about his slowness. We used to be corduroy kings. Now he only exists between the night and day of my eyelids, with my letters scrunched into his back pocket.
4. Once, someone told me about the hierarchy of sadness. I understood quite immediately. My heartbreak was not as noble as hers, for hers was real. Her mother’s heartbreak was even more noble, for adult grief is more spangly than adolescent grief. I decided not to partake in the hierarchy at all - I learned to paint my teeth convincingly red instead.
5. I was standing opposite the twins on the roof of my house. The sky was not blue but orange, because the sun had bled to death. My hands and feet were blue. One twin held the wine glasses and the other twin held the wine. Just then I saw that flash of gold fly by. I surrendered and ascended upwards, upwards, upwards, towards the beyond.
1. I fell in love with a flash of gold that I’d only seen once or twice. I’d often glimpse its memory as I walked down the high street, or when I turned my head too fast in the evening light, or when I stared through the steam rising from my coffee. Black, black, black as the back of its head. Black like the light of the evening.
2. Last summer I spent my days in limbo at the airport, waiting for flights from here to there, to be suspended in mid air for countless hours but without my stomach in my throat. Once I bumped into an old teacher of mine, who used to teach me Lorca. He was eloping with his girlfriend. They were about to board a flight to Idaho. ‘What a bizarre place to elope’, I thought.
3. When I close my eyes I see that my imagination overflows with milk. Milky moonlight, milky sheets, milken tweth, lactose poetry. The Weatherman used to send me milk carton carcasses and velvet mourning. I still think about his slowness. We used to be corduroy kings. Now he only exists between the night and day of my eyelids, with my letters scrunched into his back pocket.
4. Once, someone told me about the hierarchy of sadness. I understood quite immediately. My heartbreak was not as noble as hers, for hers was real. Her mother’s heartbreak was even more noble, for adult grief is more spangly than adolescent grief. I decided not to partake in the hierarchy at all - I learned to paint my teeth convincingly red instead.
5. I was standing opposite the twins on the roof of my house. The sky was not blue but orange, because the sun had bled to death. My hands and feet were blue. One twin held the wine glasses and the other twin held the wine. Just then I saw that flash of gold fly by. I surrendered and ascended upwards, upwards, upwards, towards the beyond.