/ DAY 89 /

A MEMORY 6 YEARS PRIOR THAT ZACK VILLERE GIVES VOICE TO
WITH HELP BY SUFJAN STEVENS’ AGE OF ADZ ERA

You were drunk, I was coming down on Ecstasy. I wanted to linger on Cloud Nine, but you had something to shout in my ear while we laid on the makeshift bed in the living room. You kept saying ‘hey, hey, over here’ and my eyes were upturnt towards the headlights shooting out distant streetcars, dancing on the ceiling. Pupils popped across the room, my retinas ran away. I chased those lights past Saturn. Irises ringed rapidly naked around those rings and I ate velocity with my big eyes to keep tripping all night towards the trans-neptunian objects. Really, away and out of bounds of the words you had to say. I think you mistook me as someone who wasn’t lost parsecs away, long gone past the Kuiper belt.

IT’S BEEN A LONG, LONG TIME
SINCE I’VE MEMORIZED YOUR FACE

ITS BEEN FOUR HOURS SINCE
I’VE WANDERED THROUGH YOUR PLACE

So you put on Sufjan Stevens and caressed my chest hair and then threw my body back to watch you, be captivated by you slow dancing solo in the afterglow you saw in Portland’s light pollution. Love escaped your ears, your brains so bursted with it. You practically exploded every time a car beeped. Fuck, you were so in the moment. Syllables to say sensual sounds swirled on your tongue and I saw it coming so I slapped my neurons on a shooting star and slipped under 7mm thibk sheet thinking it was the way to a wormhole where I could hide, slide, away and out of danger to the sound in the silence of space.

I DO LOVE YOU
I THINK OF YOU LIKE MY BROTHER

You stripped me of my sheet. You were always stripping me of my shit. Of the walls I stood behind. And the intimacy I pretended I couldn’t do anymore. I was always inebriated to inundate the good inches in my heart with the idea that everything positive was nigh impossible. But here, on that winter night, I was high and you were drunk and we were on equal wavelengths. Suprising because you were more lightweight than I was but your drunkenness only stirred the real and the possible in you. You always were hit hard by the hooch, but you held onto the hard to experience emotions in your hand and hugged your body at the same time. I don’t know how you did it. I was always adios on an asteroid at the primero sign of amour, but announced at 3:36am ‘Kavi, Earth to Kavi, I’ve got a whole world awaiting you here. All you have to do is look.’ You serenaded me. I admired you.

EVEN THOUGH THAT’S DUMB
MAYBE THAT’S WHY I’M SO GUARDED

I’M USED TO BEING BY MYSELF

Sufan’s Futile Devices slipped into the air. You sang those words with exquisite diction. Like you’d trained. Like your tongue had muscle memory on every morpheme. Like the 750ml of vodka you’d sucked down could suck it. You had to tell me you loved me. And I was shocked. No one’d ever said those words to me. I didn’t think there was enough of me to be loved. I know you were trying to bring me home, but I liked that your words did the opposite. I was taken to a galaxy light-years away. And it was so oddball to me that the laws of physics no longer ruled and all this new energy was inside me. I imagined crash landing into your arms the minute you stopped dancing and being gripped by your gravity. I watched, turned on and rushing on a stream of serotonin no pharmaceutical could slip me into.

AND LATELY I’VE FELT
OVERWHELMED (BY YOU, YOU)

I let you dance. I let you slide next to me. I let you be big spoon and set my eyes out towards the window. You slipped into sleep with a smile. I know because I saw. Seven seconds later I saw the stars in the sky and stopped being starry eyed for you. I never got to say it to you. My silence stripped you in the morning of your sweetness and could see your sweet reserve start to shallow out in your spirit. I did that to you. My fear of intimacy did that. I knew I’d stuck the landing. So by afternoon I was already all up in Andromeda again. You were left moping in the Milky Way. Sorry.

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