Author: foxtongue

the privilege of being yours

This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.

– David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks, page 192.

I’m scribbling in that book. Marginalia in black ink. The pages are almost as pale as my skin. The words that spit from my pen are tiny, nearly incomprehensible, bumped from the motion of planes, trains, automobiles, streetcars, and an actual boat. They are call-backs, snippets and snatches, and awful jokes. “Like that time in the hotel lobby the tourists thought I was a prostitute.” My lines tilt. The words jog, my long-hand atrophied and atrocious. But this is how we will read the story together. Written time-travel. I only write to share.

We sing together. The words are slightly unfamiliar, so we play the song again, the better to affix it to our tongues. I am better at the lyrics, he is better with the sounds.

Claire takes my arm and we move forward, a cascade of notes and torch song lyrics. She and I have missed the second half of our flight from San Francisco to Vancouver, but it’s going to be alright. We missed it because of true love and chocolate and it will make a good story. We will be fine, we still have care on the line. Hers is driving down to Seattle to get us, mine is sharing music on-line and going to pick us up from a train station and offer us shelter. Their arms and our mouths. Their grace and our soft thanks. We are so grateful for how rich our lives have suddenly become. I am so grateful I cry.

My life has never been as rich as this. I have never traveled as much as I have this year. I have never felt so cherished or so rewarded. I have climbed ruins. I have walked into a warm sea. I have been to the tops of mountains and pulled with two hands from the depths of despair. He said, “come”, and he fetched me, for I was fetching, and I felt loved and I was loved and I loved him and I love him still and his eyes haunt me the way the clouds came over Chicago, the way good art can make me ache, the way it was glorious to be a passenger as my ex-boyfriend screamed us across the ridges of L.A. at twice the speed limit in the middle of the day.

“I love you,” I said. “I admire you and I like you and I appreciate you, too. All of these things are separate and each needs to be said.”

(The sunset is also beautiful, the moon also outstanding, but those are apparent and do not need to be mentioned.)

He is so pretty to my eyes that it seems absurd. I trace his face with my fingertips like I am a cartographer trying to memorize his topography with my nervous system, embed him like a program I can replay at will. The line of his side to his hip while he stands in a kitchen, his back to me, his smooth muscles sliding under clothes that I would remove. I want to taste him, I want to keep his skin on my tongue, I want to know the texture of every whorl of his fingers in my lonely mouth. I want to feel him shudder, I want him to take my face in his hands as if I were porcelain and kiss me so softly I might shatter. I want, I want, I want.

How he looks at me. I am greedy. I cannot get enough.

The annotations I am writing are mostly sweet and/or silly, but each tiny desecration is founded on affection. Even when the writing borders on the divine and all I can do is leave a mark next to a line in quiet, pure appreciation. When all I can do is put a tick next to a particular note. “Look at this, this is what I would read out loud to you, were we in bed together, were we in the same place and had enough time for books.” A lot of things are underlined.

It is autumn. I feel the dried leaves of the photos I am sent. I hear the crackling swish of what it used to be like to walk through such things, the sharp scent of winter under the softer air. There is a blurred shoe in the picture, blue jeans, and it is exactly right. It is what I need.

The ceiling over his bed is decorated with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that I bought from a dollar store. I spun a story of partners and physics, the harmony of two lovers who came together in such fine frequency that their flesh reorganized, and placed stars on the ceiling. “And this is my hand and this is your hand and my:body and your:body became our:body and the atoms danced together in forever:true. It is like they are dreaming. It is like they are the same. No longer a man and a woman, but the same.” Sometimes he takes other people to his bed, and I hurt when he does, but the sweet, artificial sky above it remains mine anyway.

I fall asleep with the book under my pillow and I wake up sobbing like my heart has been torn out so hard it has taken my voice, like I am a child who has just discovered death. I had dreamed about when my white cat died and I clawed her body out from the grave my mother put her in. How dark the dirt was on her fur and guts. I want teleportation. I want time-travel. That feeling of want, that quivering feeling of fury, large enough that by all rights it should have warped the world.

He has attached a linen tarpaulin over his truck, to better offer privacy to the make-shift bed I requested that he make in the back. It’s a two-hour layover, long enough for us to curl up together and bathe our hearts in each other’s regard. It has been over a month we have been apart and sometimes it has been hard. Our hearts are wet and warm and slippery. We talk softly and he tells me what he has learned in my absence. Last time the new word was “love”. This time the lesson is commitment. I ask him if he wants to make us all official-like. He says yes and asks what the fine print on the back of the boyfriend card entails. I will have to get back to him. I cannot yet read the writing on that wall, but even though he has hurt me before, I am sure he will do fine.

We sing together. American music. Bruce Springsteen, half of an album I have never heard through. It is like being wrapped in a blanket of safety, a black blanket pulled from the trunk of his car on a date we had once in Seattle, half our history ago, the city spread out sparkling in front of us, the expression on his face in the shop when I insisted he help pick out our foolish ice-cream. His ultra-organized “Have you even met me?” at odds with “All of this is new.” He is an artifact of his culture, parallel yet almost completely foreign to mine; of guns, bullets, and punk rock. It used to be that I did not want to care for him. Now we are apart, I would go blind for him. Now we apart, I am furious.

I stand with my bare feet on warm, dark earth. The water is a blue I have never seen in person, so clear it fractures light into rainbows as it moves. The stars at night shine brighter than our own sun. I hold a plastic mask in one hand and the straps to a jangling, industrial body-harness in the other. I am an angel of change. Somewhere close, a mountain discreetly explodes. I take pictures no one may ever see. The flowers that sprout from my skin are tropical, my heart is a greenhouse. I am actively looking for more laws to break. And the drums keep beating. They have been beating for months. The drums are huge, the light-show spectacular, and his body is pressed against mine in the crowd. We are hiding in plain sight. I do not have even a skerrick of doubt left. I am a valkyrie. I moan with relief, as he does. My forgiveness is larger than the sky.

I am so grateful. I am so grateful, again, that I cry.

Cirque du Soleil’s dance of drones and a road-trip proposal


SPARKED: A Live Interaction Between Humans and Quadcopters

Bonus: Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich, and Verity Studios also posted a behind the scenes video that goes into the progeneration of the film.

-::-

Kurios, the newest Cirque show is going to be playing the west coast this winter. In my quest to see EVERY Cirque show, I have seen an unlikely number of Cirque productions – five or six tent shows (in Vancouver, Seattle, and Montreal), and four of the eight shows permanently installed in Vegas – and Kurios is easily one of my very favourites, right up there with “O”. (I saw it in Montreal during it’s opening run while I was there for ReCon.) It’s a clockwork time-travel, turn-of-the-century bit of deliciousness, dipped in retrofuturistic science fiction and with an undeniable City of the Lost Children vibe. Very brass, electricity, and polished wood, but bright and colourful and sweet.

It’s playing Seattle from January 29th, 2015, to February 22nd and I would very much like to go with as many of you beautiful people as possible. (Unlike the majority of my road-trips, this is being proposed far in advance.) So, with that in mind, who would like to come with me? Let’s plan!

this is not a temporary error

Vancouver poet Zaccheus Jackson’s death by train in Toronto ‘an absolute tragedy’
36-year-old Alberta native is remembered as a passionate educator who was “just fully coming into his power” as a spoken-word poet of Blackfoot descent.

Zaccheus was a good person as well as a good poet. He was a bright light, easy to recognize even at a distance, and he shone constantly and tirelessly and true. Even though I met him years ago, he was one of the only people who could still coax me to come out to a poetry slam.

I am sorry I didn’t get to know him better. I am grateful for how much I did.

Always remember to tell people when you love them. Nothing is permanent. There is no such thing as the future. There is now and then there is maybe, possibly, only potentially a later version of now. Tell people you appreciate them, that they move you, that you respect them, that their taste in clothes is nice, that the way they move is graceful, that you like how they place their hands on the wheel of the car as they drive, that you adore when they sing along to the radio, that their stutter is appealing, that their guitar face is ravishing, that your admiration for their way with words is endless and honest, that you are attracted to them, that you are in awe of how silly they can be, that you think it’s great that thing they did one time, you remember, with the fork and their niece, that thing, you still think about them, you think about them and you smile, that you think about them and cry, that you think about them, that you miss them, that you sympathize, that you admire and recognize their efforts, that you grasp what they are trying to say, that you regard their puns as a necessary evil, that you commend their sensitivity, that you respond to their touch, that you feel the world is better with them in it, that you worship their cooking, that you long for more time with them, that you idolize the same values, that you are fascinated by the same things, that you hold them dear, that you have had your mind changed by their point of view, that you dig their taste in music, that you value their opinion, that you applaud their parenting, that you esteem their criticism, that you enjoy the way they make you laugh, that you luxuriate in their attention, that you treasure their affection, that their approval makes you happy, that you want to make them proud, that they inspire pride, that you care for them, that they satisfy your curiosity, that they are sweet, that they are treasured, that that shirt matches their eyes, that you’re glad to have met them, that it’s no problem to help out, that you are glad to be of service, that you accept their charity, that they are cherished, that they are anything and everything, that we, each one of us, is the world. Remember and tell them and love and love and love.

“The fastest we live is still the slowest we die.” – Zaccheus

Tell them, your friends, your loved ones, but the acquaintances, too. Tell everyone. Fight against the inevitable coming of night.

-::-

She’s Still Dying On Facebook

“On March 2, more than four years ago now, Lea died of substance-abuse-related liver failure. June 10 would have been her 27th birthday. This time of year is when she’s always most on my mind, and I’m sure that some Facebook technician who keeps track of what we all do on the site would report that my visits to Lea’s profile increase exponentially as the weather gets warmer. I don’t know how, exactly, I managed to open up my old messages with Lea. I want to say that Facebook put the messages there—that I didn’t click the button, that they just appeared, Lea’s face popping up because she had something to say, she wanted to chat. But I must have clicked. Maybe by accident. Still, I can’t ignore the pull of my bookworm’s interpretation, arguing that technology is the closest human beings come to magic. I know nothing about the way the Internet works. I still half-believe the Internet is simply air. So why isn’t it plausible that Lea’s messages appeared in response to how much I miss her, to my own guilt about her death.

[…]

Lea died the first time soon after she joined Facebook, when I witnessed her transformation into someone she would have mocked and pitied. She died again, a smaller death, a year or so before her real-world one, when she basically stopped posting altogether. On March 2, she died publicly, her wall turning into the memorial it is now. To me, she’s died again and again since then. The posts remembering her are fewer and fewer, months apart sometimes. When I rediscovered our messages, she died again—in a different way, because I’d come face to face with how I failed her. Facebook has made her death a sort of high-concept horror movie. How many more times will I grieve her? How many more details from my past, from Lea’s past, are buried online, waiting for me to uncover them?”

my deep appreciation for terrible places and what they can teach us

  • Duke University: Society bloomed with gentler personalities, more feminine faces: Technology boom 50,000 years ago correlated with less testosterone.

    My first impression was of taupe, tan, plush, dark wood, and cream velveteen. The hotel seemed built with an eye for what someone imagined inoffensive luxury would look like. Everything that wasn’t gleaming stone was either shining metal or carpeted. Staff stood by every door to insulate guests from carrying bags, opening doors or having to walk ten feet alone from the front desk to the concierge. A bronze Richard MacDonald sculpture of a slim, impossibly elegant trumpeter stood alone on a round marble table in front of the elevators. (I ran a finger down the length of her spine, wondering at her musculature. She was pointed a different direction almost every time I went by. Moved by staff or guests, I never found out.) We had lunch on a veranda surrounded by palm trees and water fountains and ignored napkins with a higher thread count than most sheets. Very little felt real.

    Thirty:ninth floor. Top button in the lift. As couch-surfing goes, I leveled up. The room was a four minute walk from the elevator. Again with the scale. The closet was big enough to hold a mattress, the bathroom that and half again, and the room was even more meticulously crafted than the hall to imply richness yet stay innocuous. Nothing was brightly coloured or printed with a solid pattern. Nothing looked experimental or even extravagant, but more as if everything had been chosen through focus group. Magazine cover bland and comfortable.

    In spite of the obvious tax bracket of untouchable leisure, I rearranged the furniture as soon as I arrived, hauling a heavy glass table aside so the eight-foot sofa could be turned around the face the floor to ceiling window wall. (The bed was gigantic, too, but not mine.) Having such a thing face the room was a waste. The photo here is the view from my pillow of The Strip. Though it was nicer at night, it was more difficult for a phone to photograph.

    As an introduction to a trip, I had never experienced anything quite like it. I had expected to be buffered from Vegas toxins by people I like, but I did not expect to be buffered by trickle-down economics as well. Moving from a mattress on the floor of a sketch-fest apartment to one of the aristocratic hotels was a more interesting leap than I am accustomed to. Vegas is decadently artificial, yet there I was, swaddled by an extraordinary amount of care. It didn’t make it better to be in such a place, but it changed the timbre of the thousand cuts I experienced there, a socially conscious mermaid visiting the shores of privilege. For example, the only white skinned workers I could see were the ones who interacted directly with hotel guests. Another, everyone is paid to pause and greet you when you walk by, no matter how involved or strenuous their current task might be. Just by your presence, you interrupt their flow. It’s mandatory. It’s awful. It made me deeply, visibly uncomfortable. My skin crawled a tiny twitch with every hello.

    The so-called city of excess, pleasure, and party doesn’t back up what it markets. Be wild! But within very particular measures. Stay up all night! Except that everything is closed by four. Go crazy! But only in ways the powers that be have measured and accounted for. It’s the most proscribed public place I have been.

    I was waiting for my ride to the DefCon shoot, an event where a bunch of hackers all ride out into the desert to destroy a variety of targets with advanced and complicated weaponry, when I decided to demonstrate the peculiar boundaries of the city of sin. I had been talking with a friend, tracing in the air the imaginary and artificial cultural box we were standing in. The easiest way to offer my point, though, was to lie down on the ground, so I did. Nothing more complicated than that. I lay down on the polished and sealed cobblestones of the sidewalk next to the valet pick-up of one of the more expensive hotels on the Strip and started counting. I did not look distressed. I did not make any noise. I simply stretched out and waited.

    It took less than a minute. Someone was there almost immediately, “Miss, what are you doing? You can’t do that. You have to get up. You are upsetting the people on the cameras.” The man who calls the taxi, hand to his ear, up to an almost invisible microphone, his thirty minute line-up forgotten, less of a priority than I was, peacefully lying on the ground.

    Not many places in the first world are so terrifying or for so many reasons.

    I am glad I went for a completely different set of events, I’ve come back from Vegas with a lot healed in my head and heart, but I have to admit that little moment was a source of intense satisfaction as well. Part of the way I’m wired declares that it’s important to be able to social hack a place as efficiently as possible. Can’t break the rules properly until they are fully understood.

    • a collection theory of unlinear operators

    Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell

    leaving is not enough; you must
    stay gone. train your heart
    like a dog. change the locks
    even on the house he’s never
    visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
    you have an apartment
    just your size. a bathtub
    full of tea. a heart the size
    of Arizona, but not nearly
    so arid. don’t wish away
    your cracked past, your
    crooked toes, your problems
    are papier mache puppets
    you made or bought because the vendor
    at the market was so compelling you just
    had to have them. you had to have him.
    and you did. and now you pull down
    the bridge between your houses,
    you make him call before
    he visits, you take a lover
    for granted, you take
    a lover who looks at you
    like maybe you are magic. make
    the first bottle you consume
    in this place a relic. place it
    on whatever altar you fashion
    with a knife and five cranberries.
    don’t lose too much weight.
    stupid girls are always trying
    to disappear as revenge. and you
    are not stupid. you loved a man
    with more hands than a parade
    of beggars, and here you stand. heart
    like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
    heart leaking something so strong
    they can smell it in the street.

    – Marty McConnell

  • Leatherdo – a stainless steel multitool hair clip designed by Yaacov Goldberg.
  • Beautiful Beast – a golden spider broach worn as a temporary piercing.

    I’m flying out again on Saturday. This time to Vegas for a week of security conferences: BlackHat, B-Sides, and DefCon. I’m only official for one, but another is free and the third I shall attempt to sneak into, because I probably can and it’ll be fun. Also, what else is there for the poor to do in Vegas?

    My time “home” in Vancouver has been busy, but mostly without anchor. I domesticate well and gladly, but my attachments are to people, not places. My days, instead, have been spent on phone calls with New York and messages on-line with Michigan, Washington, Ontario, and Oklahoma. Nothing that digs me in where I am. I have spent the majority of this summer away, living basic out of a suitcase, and confirmed that not only do I enjoy/prefer it, the only things I miss are my ferrets and (sometimes) Seattle. So the crusade to pare my apartment down continues. The desire for rococo minimalism continues. Soon my life will be nothing more than a pair of ferrets, some media and data devices, a spot of taxidermy, some art, a few weapons, and an elegant wardrobe of motorcycle and combat gear, Victorian lace, and kevlar flounces.

    A more telling list may not actually exist.

    Which reminds me, as soon as I get an influx of cash, I have projects to work on again. I’ve been window shopping for a used motorcycle, drive shaft, no spokes, a machine with muscle unlikely to break down, but first is safety. Sewing with leather, something light-up with spinal protective armor, and a jacket to resurface. LED’s, el-wire, arduino VS raspberry pi. Ideas nipping at my heels like starved little purse chihuahuas shaking in the harsh reality of my financial winter. Ideas that had long been erased. My resources are shifting, bruised heart on my sleeve, capabilities ratcheting back into gear, the coastal combinations of care like cards on a table. There are no aces hidden next to my wrist, but perhaps I’ll embroider one in. I have a deep love for those tiny, clever touches.

    Meanwhile I find myself unable to spend more than three nights in a row in my own bed. Crashing over at Nathan’s, crashing over at Nicholas and Esme’s; laundry, dinner, a long run of Orphan Black. Different reasons, but the same underlying dis-attachment to my where I keep my things. To further push this, I am attempting to sublet my room for the month of August. I should have done it sooner, for June and July, given how little I was there, but starting now will have to do. I don’t know the map past August 12th, but even if I do not find my way to the desert, I will make do. I am inhabiting my language, embracing my internal architecture all the way to the edges of my vision and I have the keys to five other houses on my key-chain. I will be okay.

    It is an awful place, but I am beginning to look forward to Vegas. The teal sky stretched like silk over the blind roads and senseless cacophony, the inevitable black t-shirts with witty taglines and open bars buzzing with abuse. It is not going to be at all like my last time there or the time before that or the time before that. Each visit before has been fraught with conflict, stress a thin note running through every decision. This time I will not be alone, isolated or rejected. I will not have been sent for to stand as a peace-maker to sordid drama, I will not have been brought along as a sop, I will not be going as a dismantled half. No matter how this week unfurls, (and it does have some very interesting possibilities), none of the previous scenarios will have a chance to duplicate. There will be a tribe this time, there will be people I care for who care for me. (My best medicine). New people, new skills. This trip will be unique and for that I am grateful. The city will not poison me. Though the Vegas strip is a manipulative construct, a gigantic shrine dedicated to the worst of the states, the people I will be walking with share my inherent refusal to genuflect.

    • we are history

    As Israel’s assault on Gaza intensifies, it is not anti-Semitic to say: not in my name, by Laurie Penny, (emphasis mine):

    It is not anti-Semitic to suggest that Israel doesn’t get a free pass to kill whoever it likes in order to feel “safe”. It is not anti-Semitic to point out that if what Israel needs to feel “safe” is to pen the Palestinian people in an open prison under military occupation, the state’s definition of safety might warrant some unpacking. And it is not anti-Semitic to say that this so-called war is one in which only one side actually has an army. […]

    Last weekend, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children around the world marched to express their disgust at Israel’s air and ground assault on the Gaza Strip, and among them were swathes of Jews and Israelis. This is one of the few situations in which it makes a difference to stand up and say: not in our name. Not now, not ever again. Being Jewish, or having Jewish roots, doesn’t make you responsible for what is happening in Gaza, but it does mean that your dissent carries that much more weight. Not more weight than the grieving relatives of the families butchered in Shejaiya, but the kind of weight that hangs heavy on the heart, and that comes with the small but palpable risk of upsetting your family.

    So here it is. I think my ancestors who were persecuted, tormented and exiled down the centuries for being Jews would be horrified to see what is being done in their name today.

    You’re alright / For someone’s summer kind of sickness


    San Fermin – Sonsick – Audiotree Live

    I found me a hopeless case and resolved to love
    Maybe we can find a decent place when I’m old enough
    Found love in an empty gaze, tried to fix it up
    I found me a hopeless case, oh, oh.

    I’ve been fueled by single size candy-bars this week, returning to Canada face first into my stash of kit-kats and candy scooped from various Google offices. I would say the amount of sugar I’ve consumed this week would be a problem, but it’s keeping my brain going.

    My problem, more, is where to start. I want to dive in to all of the stories that I have been living, but I am stymied by the staggering number of moments that I should be sharing, should be documenting but instead have been allowing to slip past me, unrecorded, and so, eventually, unremembered. Our grandparents probably did not write very often, our parents probably only wrote a little bit more, but our generation knows The Word, knows its power, understands that literacy is a window into history. Our own as well as that of others. Society seems nostalgic for what came before, but really, we have never had it better than this. Yet here I am, wasting the page, spending my Friday night sitting in front of a screen.

    -::-

    My chemicals problems feel like they have swallowed me whole. Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, epinephrine, norepinephrine. Long words for relatively simple things. Call and response. But when they should trigger, failures. Call and then nothing. The grapes shrivel on the vine.

    I went to the doctor today to ask for a test to gauge the levels of depletion, in order to add them to my file, to try and see what could be fixed. The doctor refused, says I need to “talk it out”, but he is wrong. It is physical and I am tired of being permanently defused. I want to be lifted up by life again. I want to be able to touch the world and feel it.

    Meanwhile, I have been put in the position of needing to dismantle some of the only care and intimacy that I ever have found completely satisfying. Bloody difficult. Needful, but the logistics slay me. How does this even work? This isn’t a task I’ve built a tool-set for.

    Instead, we play the question game. We entertain ourselves, we put off the inevitable for a few hours more. I quote Shakespeare. He claims I am risking his life. On the surface, this is very little. Peel through the layers, it is the world. When I ask why he continues the dance, we are no longer playing. He stays. I stay. He calms me. It is enough.

    -::-

    Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire. — François de la Rochefoucauld

    We set off fireworks for my birthday when I was in Seattle a few weeks ago. My dearest and I, scouting along the river at midnight, along with one of my best friends. All of the romance of shifting with a left hand. Explosions, incredible, gigantic explosions.

    We texted a handful of our people, looking for co-conspirators, fellow anarchists ready and willing to break a handful of small laws. Only one replied, but he took awhile to drive south enough to meet us, so this fey creature and I found ourselves by the river, booting about a park the size of a postage stamp, a discarded piece of land too small for even the city to care about. I was in heels, fool I, as I had walked through my sandals when I was in San Francisco, but the rough chunks of cement proved to be easier to clamber over than I would have expected. I almost fell anyway, slipping in the dirty, industrial dark, but he was there, elegant as calligraphy, the odd way he moves, this man, this boy I would love some day.

    All of these things I write about, but I do not write about him. Again. Yes, again.

    Let me tell you instead of other people, other parts and pieces of my history. The one who lied, lied as I watched, as I suddenly knew. Silver at his temples, silver and silver, thirty plus two pieces, some better future offered in the palm of his hand. Take it, he offers, take it and forgive me and help me and we will conquer. He looks at me as if I am the one who keeps the keys to the prison of his life. When he looks at me like this, as if I am needed, a requirement for breathing, I cannot deny him anything. Who am I to judge the lost? We are the same.

    Or another, the one who omitted, who erased. How he read what I wrote and felt, slightly, like he was dying, even though I held him through it, wrapped him in a cloak of my care. “That might be making it worse.” I understood but I wasn’t going to let go. We were in a park, a beautiful place I had never been that he knew I would like. In that space, his favourite tree. We watched the ferries come in and leave again. What an interesting thing to care about, I originally thought, a favourite tree. I was struck by the novelty, but in that moment came the realization that it matters to me that it matters to him. It was like listening to a motionless heart start beating. I carry it, that recognition. I am incapable of forgetting. Through his eyes, the red wood is new and beautiful. I am redefined. “It makes me happy to make you happy,” he said, our selves clasped together. What else is a definition of love?

    Now that I have started writing again, I am shocked that it has taken so long to do this again. Here are the words, the letters, the language. Tied to these men, to these memories, tied to the bare winter branches of everything I have left. It is only the middle of summer, but it feels like I have lived an entire year since January.

    The fireworks; our own thing, finally shared. The thick sulfur smoke stayed in the air, praise for our work. A grubby stranger paused in robbing a local stock yard, stripping it of metal, to watch. We laughed, argued with lighters, dashed to the illusion of safety and back again. I lightly burned part of my left hand, sparks from a short fuse. He kissed it later, unknowingly, and I felt the sting again. Electric flares, willows of light. The concussives were so large they punched holes in the air, slammed into our rib-cages, forced my mind to focus. I almost felt like I was under water, how it has been described to me, the voices stilled, as if music were playing to drown out the entire world underneath the shock of the sound of the bombs.

    They were almost bright enough, almost loud enough, almost enough, almost, almost, to get through.