I remember you lying on my father's lawn--your head in my lap with your arms and legs taking up as much of the universe as possible.

you do not sleep like this, no.
your curl into the body beside you, the pillow, yourself...

YOU CURL INTO THE DREAMS THAT REFLECT
EVERYTHING AND NOTHING
OF YOUR REALITY

"I wish I could just curl up with you and sleep forever"
you are, to me, beautiful when you sleep

I promised you, quite a while back, a bedtime story. Instead, I offer you a memory...

I woke you when I came to visit, knowing that your sleep was precious, to have you look up at the only window still illuminated at 3a.m.. It was, I told you, most definitely the home of an old woman, beautiful and mad. It's tea time in her world, I said.

you sighed and smiled...

"She's in at least her 80th year of neverending youth, her siamese cat no less company than the queen."

and still you just smiled...

"There is honey", I said, "and milk and biscuits for tea. There is madness and beauty."

"Oh, Angel", you said...
and you closed your eyes
for just a heartbeat longer than a blink.

I felt like I had won. I wanted to paint the world for you, share the images that dance before me, not just the flattened ones imprisoned in a roll of film.
There are lurking Tim Burton-esque shadows, sidewalk cracks reaching like withered claws. There is magic in a raindrop and a palpable pulse in the earth.
I wanted you to see, to feel to hear. I wanted to teach you how to interpret the whispers most people dismiss as the wind.

I wonder sometimes if you always could.

and I wanted to visit your world too.
I wanted your reality to wash over me.

We stood halfway up the spiralling stairs. At the bottom lay a computer monitor and keyboard--chunks of plastic, misshapen metal and shards of glittering glass.

"I would have loved to have seen it fall"
and I remember the look in your eyes when you said it

*

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