It was a Monday. I think that we shared a spliff while surrounded by water lily contagion. We tethered our canoe to the sinking turf with your stepdad’s old bungee cords. We deciphered the earth as the evergreen cusp of childhood utopia and buzzing hunger. I find myself returning to that tricky, soft, mauve patch in my throat, desperate to recite and expel my muddled breath. To tell a story with the sweet swelling that my baba does. If you can hear this confession leaping quietly over the lake’s curve, will you plant two knocks on my bedroom door? Will you floss the sacrilege out of my frayed God’s grin?

As you write caution on my wrists infatuation grows from moss. 

Find me. 

Find me.

When you and I first met, you sounded the vowels of my name out—I warned you that my limbs may vanish in the last sung ‘a.’ It happened sometime during the first inhalation of summer’s lungs, the syllable fell to my swaying feet. My mother and I buried it down in my father’s uncut reeds and weighed it down with pond stones. She taught me a lip of her language if only to pocket my mourning, just like she and her sisters used it to pass palms full of secrets as girls. 

I wrote farewell cards to my childhood home this summer, barefoot and blistered on Lake Simcoe’s floor. Where you let peach juice drip past the warmth of your Adam’s apple and I learned the moth-devoured language of motionless limbs aching to touch and consume. I found your letter, three cards sewn together by raffia. You signed off with such a fickle farewell—I can’t wait to meet you and the many versions of you that will come in time. 

I can’t wait to meet her.

I know I’ll love her.

It was Monday in June and the subway left my bare knees trembling. It struck me then that I may have forged my body in your grasp. That I may have never truly existed at all, liquid and unlucky falling into the red felt of our seats. I felt you reciting, in the steady pulse of your hands, the eulogy you must have written days earlier. 

I knew that you had met her.

When the sting of your kiss meeting my forehead came punching, I scribed love and hatred as once again steeping interchangeably in that old china pot. I am not immune to fever dreams pouring out with one last cup.

And now, perhaps, the language is lost and moths find slumber in my body. The man who believes my irises change as the sun sleeps, who holds my forged body above the current, who relics me tenderly will never meet me.

It was a Monday. I think that we shared a spliff in Earth’s cool palm. Your mom told you that your laughter could have made the lake warm, while the earth took me by my ankle and swept me into the undercurrent. 

It was a Monday that I decided I would write him a letter. 

He will never read it and somewhere in my bones, I know that’s for the better. I can touch and smooth the velvet of my flesh. My palms lean towards parcels of purity and saccharine. The last ‘a’ of my name is sung by the sweet mumbling of your voice in the early morning. I am nourished by citrus and awoken by the soft orange light of your curtains.

The tricky, mauve patch liberates my murky breath and before I know it, I feel her sinking into me. 

I can’t tell you how long I have waited to meet you again.