indians and their tricky gifts

1. last night i dreamed of punching my sister’s face repeatedly. never hard enough. one time i hit her lip and she made a small throat-sound, but mostly i hit her around the eyes. there were no soft yellow bruises. then suddenly i’m running, running on the paths in the woods and ahead there is this single birch tree half-stripped and very pink or very blue, depending on the place. i adored it so completely, there wasn’t room for even my lungs to grow with air, for a moment.

2. i am in the kitchen, cutting lemons. i like cutting lemons quite a bit. all evening i am sucking my fingers and staring at things with swampy, tree-grey eyes. i tend to stare at things i am not even looking at. i gave a women the heimlech manuever. it was a peculiar and awkward situation. i didn’t feel very much like the hero i imagined i would afterwards.

3. there are many things i would like. firstly, i would like an ivy-slathered brick house with a porch that winds around the side. i would like a record-player that only plays lonely songs i do not know, to never again wear shoes and to sit next to you in the evenings, watching the sky grow lavender and thin, like stretchmarks over the hip of the earth.

i keep picturing this life as a tossing, tremendous ocean. we have departed from a continent of unexisting, only in search of another. you and i are both at this point, thrashing and slashing through the water, watching the sun spindle in and out of view and loving it, both ways, loving the birds and their pale, salty wings, loving how our boats happen to be banging into each other like clumsy kissing mouths, this moment. the wooden music they make. it is at this point in the ocean, where we are both too soon into our journey to consider the dense blue land that we are moving, fast and faster towards. to consider the mass grave where all these stormless hours are sent to, no longer ticking, when they are finished with themselves. we will talk about telescopes like they are children’s toys, like they are full of their own shores and stars qnd there is no truth inside them. but we are both growing a little cold and a little worried and we know it is because someday we will believe in them. believe in them so much that our own greasy, lovely hands will look more foreign than sand.