過去

The past trails after me as a cluster of memories that have failed to be forgotten.
They grasp my sleeves, wanting to hold me close, wanting to touch my face and kiss my eyes closed.
In the nothingness of nighttime, they sit aside my bed, indenting the covers, gazing, with hands made of old moments and goodbyes, they smooth down my skin and push pins through my eyelids.
They split my chest open with knives made of spilled tears and pull away the flesh like I have pulled away from living.
My heart doesn't beat, it lays as a place holder for the promise of days to come. My ribs, cracked yet still solid, cradle it fondly, protecting it from what the world has to offer.
Those hands scratch at me, squeeze the breath right from my lungs, pull my organs like they would pull a thread through a sewing needle.
My blood runs warm and gentle, it stains everything I've ever had.
When sunlight shines across the room and I am no longer a corpse of the night, those memories with their familiar fingers and unsettling presence once more fall behind me to create a shadow of who I once was and who I long to be once more.

being alive at night

The silence of darkness.
The silence of sleep.
The silence of my mind racing.
When the sky above me turns to milky opaqueness dotted with specks of light, I stretch my arm out to line my fingers up with the constellations. They play around my hand with silver lined clouds in tail. They are air and water and tiny droplets of starlight.
Each little droplet could contain a million animals or a million people or a million cities. They are a million seconds apart from each other and a lifetime away from me. 
I can close my hand, dig my fingers into my palm and grab a handful of those dancing drops and pull them into me.
Absorb those animals and people and cities and all the love they share between them. An innumerable amount of love. A million different kinds.
Love for the morning, love for cold soup, love for ripped sweaters, love for worms that dry up on the sidewalk, love for books with cracked spines, love for walking through the snow, love for cigarette smoke, love for sadness, love for paper cuts, love for forgetting a word, love for dead people, love for alive people, love for you and for me. 
Love for us, individually and together.

las estrellas fugaces que ví en aquella noche.

I have dreams of memories that are not my own.

I walk through rooms worn with years, they are dull and dusty.

I run my hands across the cracked baroque wallpaper that surrounds me.

The patterns touch and connect, leading me to a forgotten place.

Porcelain sheets adorn the tired bed in place of perfection, pillows lay in wait for eyes to close on top of them.

Pictures of people that have lived so much life hang like bodies.

They melt and weep down the walls.

They weep for me and for themselves.

The window that bathes everything in twisting streams of soft light is open, but veiled by a fragile curtain that doesn't move.

Through that curtain, through the intricate map of cracks in the cold glass, I see the night sky.

It's dark and opaque but still bright, and somehow the stars still flicker and dance across the horizon.

Surely, this sky is the same as the one I see in my waking world.

Surely, this sky will embrace me.

Yo tengo recuerdos. Mis recuerdos.

laughing in the water

there's a man at the bottom of the sea.

his hair does not sway gently, moving like threads in the

comforting currents.

his skin is not moist and ashen like porcelain.

his hands do not grasp the sand and grit, fingers running

through grains like time.

his eyes are not shining nor limpid, soul concealed

underneath them.

his voice is not smooth when he sings, 
laughs and cries alike trapped in the unlit murkiness.

rather, he lays there, still as silence, among the forgotten.

a glassy gaze forever trying to see past the surface.

the sun illuminates his face.

he floats his words to the surface in a million bubbles,

waiting for someone to catch them.

he melts into water, form dissipating,

remnants of him buried.

he is waiting for me.

the way we were.

I remember when my father used to carry me up the stairs after I had fallen asleep on the living room floor. Next to the window I lay, watching the stars twinkle until I was lulled to sleep by the night's silence.

He carried me quietly, tiptoeing up the steps with my loose body in his arms. I always woke up when he reached the very top, but I never opened my eyes. I continued my feigned slumber and let him tuck me in because I knew it made him happy. He would support me with one shaky arm while pulling the covers back with the other. He laid me to rest and drew the blanket up almost to my neck. I kept my breathing steady as he brushed the hair from my face and placed it behind my ears.

When he retreated his hand, he would stand there for a time, not moving, maybe staring. He did nothing, but shortly after I would hear his footsteps and the click of the door closing. I was still, deathly still, until I was sure he had left and gone back downstairs.

I would sit up and slowly get out of bed, moving to the large window that overlooked the street. Opening it carefully, I climbed out onto the roof silently and sat directly in front of the window sill. The roof's slope was soft, so I didn't slide off. The old shingles rubbed against my pants, leaving pieces of themselves all over me. I tried not to shift my feet too much as any small movement made a gravelly type of noise that sounded a hundred times louder in the night.

Most nights, the boy from next door would join me till dawn, observing the sky and ground. All the houses in our neighborhood were not three feet from each other, allowing him to jump over to my roof from his with little effort. He sat close to me and sometimes we held hands. Together, we watched the road below, the street lamp and the flickering of house lights. The stars shimmered above us, scattered like glass on the sky and dimmed by the lights seeping from deep within the distant city.

To the left we could turn our heads and see the school. We were in the same class but didn't talk often. Only when we reached middle school did we really get to know each other. We walked to school on the foggy mornings together, and returned the same way. We sat, backs to our lockers at lunch time, sharing the food our mothers had packed for us.

On weekends, we bussed to the city and adventured around downtown all day. We got ice cream and window shopped. When we got tired, we would sit outside the coffee shop looking at people pass by and drinking iced black tea. He would laugh at the lady with a strange hat, the stern looking business man with a stained shirt, the child that tripped and cried. I would smile and examine his delicate laugh lines. He would say, 'Why is everyone in such a hurry?' while leaning back in his chair.

We usually arrived home at twilight and he would spend the night at my house. We laid on our sides, face to face on my narrow bed. I was pressed against the wall and we held hands. As we tried to fall asleep in the early hours of dawn, the sun glowed red through the venetian blinds and he sang in a hushed tone,

'Good night, good night,

The stars again,

Are shining so bright,

Sleep with no fear,

with good, happy dreams,

I'll still be here,

When morning comes,

I'll still be near,'

My eyes would slide shut and I would dream of him. When I woke up in the afternoon, he would be beside me dozing peacefully, our fingers still entwined. I pressed my forehead against his and listened to his rhythmic sighs. When he opened his eyes a short time later, we would make our way downstairs to eat and watch the sun shine through the kitchen window. We talked about anything, everything. Our family, our experiences, our interests, ourselves.

Nothing changed when we entered high school. We spent our first and second years much the same as we had for the longest time.

However, something was different in our third year. He had made more friends and even joined a club, I'm not sure which. At breaks and lunch time, I would sit outside or in the library and read. He stopped coming and I stopped bringing lunch.

On weekends, I wouldn't see him. I walked the city streets alone, or stayed home and counted the birds that landed in the trees. On nights I spent on the roof, I sat by myself and sometimes saw him come home late, strolling down the sidewalk and making his way to the front door of his house. I always wondered where he had been, what he had been doing, who he was with.

When we talked, it was about meaningless things. What we had learned in class, a book I read last week, the nice weather. I wondered when our conversations became so dull, when he had stopped being there, when I had stopped caring. When did we drift so far?

In March, a month from graduation, my father died.

He didn't come to the funeral. I saw the light from his room when I climbed up on the roof the night of the funeral. It was cold. My breath froze as I sang almost soundlessly,

'The stars again, are shining so bright,'

I could hear my mother crying through the open window of the bedroom that now belonged only to her. Sobbing, moving, breaking.

'I'll still be here,'

An ever bright moon shone a crescent above the trees, sometimes obscured by clouds that moved across the horizon. They were grey and wispy, edges illuminated. I shrugged off my suit jacket. It slid from me, down the roof and onto the grass, a black heap.

'When morning comes,'

He shut his curtains and his room went dark, I knew he had gone to sleep. My eyes watered and my throat became too tight. My voice was uneven and thick.

'I'll still be near. . .'