Beyond My Fingertips

          Happiness & transcendence & flight are not the same paradise anymore. I am undone, unlaced. It means I’m anything but fine. O the urgency of having to love you just to keep myself alive. I am looking to give love as I have always done. I know you are just looking for belonging.  After all this time, has anything changed?

          Let me tell my acts of broken bedsprings. What it felt like to be free and fucking reckless and pulsing endlessly inside our secrets.

          You show me your newfound sobriety written with marks counting the days you have gained from all those days you had lost. We talk about the people we used to be, and we laugh about the pieces of us that we can’t find funny.

          Words and music tick & drip of time passing. You continue to write your letters and hold them up to the universe in vague desperation. You stayed out there alone, unfeeling, fixated on intangible hollowness you think you’ll find in these mountains that are only mountains.

          I scavenge pasts for embroidery, biting into the thread I use to mend myself. Do you ever think of me? I will still sometimes pass a stranger whose smell tastes like you, drunk, in your second-hand bed, at 4am. A shimmering ghost, infinitely just beyond my fingertips.

          How will this end? After all, there are so many things I turned out not to be. I want to make sure this will at least end up being a good story.
 
 
 
 
(In order of appearance, this cento borrows lines from: Ariel N. Banayan (“Graffiti found in an LA bathroom stall at 2:24 AM,” Issue No. 17); Anna Press (“Clawing up the incline,” Issue No. 17); Neal Suit (“Fine,” Issue No. 17); Anthony Aguero (“Human Immunodeficiency Virus,” Issue No. 16); Nardine Taleb (“emigration,” Issue No. 16); Vic Nogay (“a list of texts i never sent you,” Issue No. 19); Jake Street (“The Passion,” Issue No. 17); Vic Nogay (“a list of texts i never sent you,” Issue No. 19); Amy-Jean Muller (“Promises,” Issue No. 17); Megan Cannella (“Things I already know,” Issue No. 19); Mandy Macdonald (“In Sardinia,” Issue No. 17); Sean Cunningham (“God,” Issue No. 19); Rachael Crosbie (“Versions of Fire,” Issue No. 17); Renu Su (“Hunting Embroidery,” Issue No. 17); Vic Nogay (“a list of texts i never sent you,” Issue No. 19); Megan Cannella (“Between You and Now,” Issue No. 17); Neal Suit (“Fine,” Issue No. 17); Melissa Boles (“Couplet,” Issue No. 16); Mary Rose Manspeaker (“I may not be the Jesus Christ I once fondly imagined myself, but I think I must make a good cup of tea,” Issue No. 19); Megan Cannella (“Between You and Now,” Issue No. 17)).