that traveler’s hat, you wear it to some odd places. old places, in-between places, places that will hold to no frame of reference. you drag your feet through one long restless gathering of all that ever was, shrouding yourself in a cloud of time’s detritus until your mind is eaten alive by apocryphal recollections, or until a manasseh rain deigns to wash clear your vision. you calibrate the days with the nights and the living with the dreaming. “we may never pass this way again!” becomes the battle cry of a manic cataloger. it is why i always write it down when i wake up.

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sometimes when the air is very still, i think of my innards and blood and bones jostling in a precarious tension, and feel weighted with the responsibility of one who tends to a delicate garden. my childhood is rent with stories of the inanimate that long to become flesh, when in fact it is the flesh that covets a symbiosis with the non-sentient in order to become deathless - i am plastic, i am glass, i am unmoved by the stern sentinels of time. for this reason i sometimes wrap my fingers around a warm stone, a gift from the beach, or on a more macabre note, imagine what it would be like to swallow a gallon of sand, burying my body alive from the inside out.

or perhaps, slide under the very skin of a wall.
‘paper-thin’ does not even begin to cut it, when your lungs stop expanding for air. what kind of dream begrudges its guest the simple dignities of dimension? i am compressed and completely drenched in flatness, a cross-section of myself. the room i play spectator to is a flutter of tinseled gaiety. its people speak in exuberant bursts of color, not in a way you or i could overhear nor understand, but it is all very pretty. the crowd performs their social dance under my paper eyes until the man with emerald rivulets for a face steps into the room, and i am suddenly ashamed for my lack of depth.

all his skin is alive with running water, little crystalline threads that call to mind a wild mountain stream escaping from height into the jaunty embrace of gravity - yet he is swathed in a stiff origami construct that remains as white and dry as weathered bones. i want to cry for his immense, unearthly beauty, but my paper heart has not yet learnt its way to my paper eyes.      

that liquid face turns to see me, and just like that, i am no longer a spectator. he now reads me like a page, intruding on my body’s borders to work some sort of ethereal medicine; i want nothing more than to lift my fingers from their cement prison and trace the curve of a watery cheek.

there is a sound of something large swinging on a hinge. from a perpendicular wall, a ship with melodious, pregnant sails leaps into view, and blows across the room to be swallowed into the ceiling, leaving an orchestra of white crystal notes suspended briefly in its wake. they shatter on the ground, a million tiny pyramids of light applauded to death by the audience’s delight.

i am graced by a soft kiss on the brow. the Origami smiles sadly, and lifts his sleeve to reveal a horrifying emptiness. hollow from the inside out, as sweet and as vacant as a lover’s promise, as endless as the interior of an egg must seem. a question sits on my lips.

i come back to myself in the dark and the sky gurgles its answer. there is nothing to do for it but to pour myself a glass of wine and sit naked on the windowsill, challenging the rain, the world.