the space above my ears.

Rendezvous at the Ticket Booth

I booked a room in the hotel inside your right temporal lobe.

The number is 324.

You have given me a key, but the door opens on its own, creaking out a reluctant welcoming.

I toss my bag on the loveseat and a cloud of cornflour rises up into the air.

The sheets are stale, ceilings stained.

All the mirrors are covered with cheesecloth.

Frankly, I expected as much.

There's a crooked bathroom to my right, parallel to the bed with a beating heart on the other side of the room.

I enter; the lights flicker.

I don't move the cloth from the mirror because just like you, I nurture the gut-wrenching fear that my reflection will smile at me.

I already need to wash my hands.

The gurgling water streaming through the faucet has traveled a long way from its home in hell.

The pool in in a dark building where it smells mostly like singed hair, a little like chlorine.

I remember the rotted-teeth feeling, a parasite festering low in my stomach, chewing at my arteries.

Don't turn around.

I won't turn around.

I wonder how the pipes here were built, because this is not your water.

I know this because it is mine.

Three rubber bands squeeze out of the faucet and are carried back down the drain by the smoke-stained water.

They try to pull me down with them.

I can't, not now.

I leave the hotel and walk into a new part of you.

I'm in a viewing room this time, gazing out a one-sided window- and look, there you are.

You're somewhere.

Not in a room, not outside, definitely not at home.

Your eyes are cast downward, idly watching your hand swirl a spoon around a murky bowl of stew.

You're having dinner with a demon, a secretary, and a talking catfish.

The catfish points out that you've hardly touched your meal.

You say you're not hungry.

The truth is you can see the fingernails floating among the soggy vegetables, and you know that even though your body screams for you to eat, you must resist or you will become one.

A martyr.

You said you wanted it.

You wanted to want it.

But you didn't.

Something fires somewhere far away and now it's me and you on the porch in June.

Your hair is longer than when I last saw you and there is no heaviness in your eyes yet.

We are young in this part, smiling.

It's little fortune cookie balancing precariously atop the bleeding mess of your memory.

This was my place, for a time, watching you shoot at soda cans across the yard.

I memorized the joints and tendons of your hand on the trigger until the rhythm of your pulse was always playing in the back of my head.

I pictured this place generations in the future, the day when a pair of people who would become important discover your shot soda can at the foot of a tree.

Dandelions have grown through it, emerging earnestly from the bullet holes.

Vanilla babies will write about it in school.

They are crossing the finish line for the umpteenth time, so therefore, all has remained the same since our last awkward small talk.

Just like you, they'll grow up numb.

Just like you, they'll amount to something acceptable and hate themselves for it.

They'll go out in a silent boom, killing everything about themselves save for the shell.

There is no moral, just the meek revelation that the vagrants were the only ones who ever knew humanity.

We were meant to fall apart, but never to stop dreaming about one another.

And so it goes.