Secret Vespers

I want a return to childhood, I want to be like turritopsis nutricula, the jellyfish you showed me, tiny and nacreous. I want to live forever, grow mature then revert to innocence, neither die nor stagnate, be able to erase and rediscover my form, my sexual fantasies, my world.

You must know I still visit that tunnel under the aquarium, with its view from under the fish and its deep blue light. Most people come during feeding, they want the agitation, the water filled with bubbles, but I come to be alone, to see the animals swim in quiet circles. This is how we really live, always returning, always waiting. Waiting, like you and I the day we met, rigid, watching the smooth movement of fish, only a meter apart.

In your office you showed me fossils from hundreds of millions of years ago. Some of those species live now. Some of them are extinct, your favorite among them. Nature is like that, you told me, sometimes the most wondrous creatures are lost.

I tried to kiss you and you moved your mouth away. You opened your collar and said, “No, here.” You arced your neck, slid your whole back against the wall, pressed up from your toes.

You told me we all die, even the immortal medusae are vulnerable. You have no idea how often I think about that.

I don’t have a plan in the world. I have the wide open sky and a bag of dried mangoes. My last girlfriend called them slices of sunshine.

I have kept the phrases my closest friends gave me. A teenager is “a case of ginger ale”, empty praise from the human resources director is “a licorice reward”, and the rocks that reach out into the bay of the small town where I grew up are “where the dragon fell asleep a thousand years ago”. I can barely describe how painful it was to choose what to keep and what to leave behind. These phrases are the best things I am keeping.

Is it crazy to take a bus this far? I cannot see myself doing it by air—too clean, too impersonal. When I arrive I will step straight down onto the broken asphalt of the parking lot. Austin, I will move my lips. I will be in the thick of its air and its smells, its dust. Change comes up at you from the ground, it doesn’t feel right any other way. This ride is centering, a stench coming from the lavatory, a rhythm maintaining the brink of nausea, a boredom that makes all my music and all my books seem boring. I only wish it could take longer. I wanted this so badly.

I want to find who you can be now that I have washed my context clean. I want to feel a rush of nerves, to laugh with you without knowing where such laughter leads, to kiss you and have no idea that a kiss can be so thrilling. I want you to give me a phrase I have never heard before.