back in my mother’s house, shifting through long-abandoned stacks of paper from my foolish youth:

I regard my intellect with a rotten eye. Blood on your hands like a bedroom stain. A new hyphenated love of comparative emotion. A new unbinding of a tangled rope. An immense detachment convulsed and split to give you entrance. Give hope to your butterflies and let them consume me. I am amazed at my kindness and at my cruelty. I am chipped, I am scratched, I am unbalanced. I have remarkable potential for failure. You have a remarkable capacity for pain. We’re no two of a kind; I’d have slit your throat by now. I don’t know the space between tolerance and cowardice. Indecisive, I tear myself to bits. I don’t need to make a choice but I need to know what I want. Disjointed, yes. A plane flies overhead. Fidelity is nothing in the face of desire. We will see where my desires lie. You will contain all my irrelevant secrets. Sending desperate messages over temperate climes. Encompassing a world in a few cluttered lines.