It's hard to believe, we said. How the days have run away from us as in flames extinguishing one by one down a path as endless as it is finite, all the while waking, getting half-way dressed, minding the carpeted steps on our house-bound routes. I remember it as if it were today, they said. One year buried within the bitter air of home, honeyed with our distraction, siblings, curl of soft pets, rent by the nameless lull behind unsleeping eyes, the relentless light from screens that afford us everything but our peace -- I want to be with someone, I want to be someone, some felt, calling to say they have considered undoing their life at some point at the age of twelve, and how no one else will notice because the world has become a vacuum of attention in the way we vacate our eyes and our skin, feet feeling no earth. We want to go back, everyone wrote, to end this dream of us circling through irreparable motions and dissolving into the panels of black boxes, to be begged to come up to the surface again by a familiar voice with no presence, while the great wave of our grief breaks over us, tumbling us into the sun.
mabel lee 