our eyes were fogged with farewells marking territories down our cheeks. the ache felt like salt at the edge of my throat and i was afraid to say it loud before you said the ocean kissed your taste buds. we both knew then.
we just knew.

maps tore apart and our paper walls built with just enough faith to last three decades broken into our salt-bitten souls. it's been too long since we've been hurt with the blue of the sky and you are not the ache in my bones when he says something i want to hear; you're the salt crusts between my fingers when i try to remember the pain i haven't really felt.

when i coughed up latitudes and minutes on to the shore, i swore i thought i was finally corporeal -- finally able to call reality dormant for all these years but i still felt transparent. my hand still slipped right through you. no warmth, no breaths, no you.
you were not here.

you were the flutter in my chest right before it grew wings, and you were the wails of the ocean when i finally broke us free. when i finally broke us free, you were the ache of the waves as they fell to their doom after crashing against a too-hardened enemy. you knew you couldn't move mountains but you were always sure you moved me.

we're no different than the salt being circulated in every ocean. we're quite similar to the blinding shine of the sunrise on the sea's skin. we've always been water-hymns for the sirens we've never seen. our story breaks with dawn everyday, dissolves our salty aches and sweeps our remains with the call of the tide.

Timothy Green bought eighteen carousels when he finally had enough pennies to fulfill the missing pieces of two childhood puzzle boxes. children in that household hated horses in the morning, so rotational conventional carnival rides were left for dark moments under a star-blanket every child has shared. songs of psychotic, woeful wind chimes were replaced with endless wave-crashing, shore rustling whispers of an ocean too far away for them to feel for themselves.
money can't buy distance, can't bring land closer to sea, can't bring the moon closer to the sun it can't ever leave. money can't make you stay.

Lawrence broke into high school lockers after hours to read the diaries of all the people he never talked to. he tucked their journal-secrets just like his shirt into his waistline and never said a word. he wrote cliche lines of self esteem on bathroom mirrors for people who hid behind foundation and fake eye lashes. he didn't do it to feel noble, to feel he had changed someone's life, to know he'd done some good; his father was a dreaming therapist who believed in sunny days and april rain and summer breezes and warm baths, and often, yellow post-it note reminders in the darker parts of journals when they were all returned to their owners by night.

celebrate color days and dream and break away from frightful alley-born men who offer the world as long as you keep your pants unzipped. sip book pages and gargle the words; let them soothe your throat - that's right, keep your eyes closed, the secrets disclosed - but spit them out before they burn and you remember.
rest under sky-held closet shelves of blue, paint them green; defy gravity, Timothy. put your money away, sweetheart. they're laughing - actually laughing - all eighteen carousels failed at it. they failed at telling a story so honest, so important, so heart-wrenchingly dramatic, so tragic, so true that the children would tuck themselves in and wake up in business suits the next day. they want to jump in rain puddles just as much as they wanted to yesterday.

sunny, rainy, miserable, positive therapists believe in secret therapy because they never got it themselves. no one went that far; Lawrence didn't dare tell his father that he hated the name he was given because then his father might read Lawrence's diary and drag his trembling fingers along the explicit details of the night Lawrence thought of making Peter's eyes roll back into his head by using just his tongue. Lawrence didn't believe in honest just as much as Lawrence's father didn't believe in charity beginning at home.

waste your sundays, boy, no one cuts their wrists on days off. they save those for birthdays and Republican holidays. drink the wine, Lawrence, we deserve a heightened toast and something colder than the pits of hell beckoning at our feet - we deserve woe and we deserve loss - so drink it away, son. for all the carousels and crying babies and fetuses who kill their mothers in the name of disease, to an unkindness of ravens which fed on your mother's corneas, and to the murder of crows which devoured our modest harvest, to the founders of this small town, to writers too afraid to drink, to invalids scared of falling for broken hearts, to dreamers who think it's sweeter said than it will ever be done, to your mother, Lawrence, my beloved Julia, to her five am kisses and her flour-clad aprons, to her toxic waffles and her brittle laughter, to the smiles she died wishing for from her children, to the carnival rides who failed her, to murderers, my boy. to woe.

<sub>There's probably a reason why I can't say that I've known you since my elbows were just dimples on my arms. And that may be simply because the sky exchanged hemispheres four years into your birth but we're just on the opposite ends of a conventional compass. Though distance is a mixture of coarse wave and rugged land levels, there have been more in our union than the planet can already decorate on its face.

The international date line has a sharp, pungent sense of humor that gives and takes hours all at the expense of fuel on the plane you're on right now. All I can say is that you have the power to give me words and no control over when to take them. The ammonium of its irony - that blessed imaginary line - sublimes over time as tragedy transcends into broken, forced smiles. It should have made me bitter. It should have faked into nothing by now. But we're still here with crescent dimples so genuine they don't leave. It's not fear, it's the time. This longitudinal that somehow controls time has yet to control you and to obstruct your judgement.

You were not my true North; you just captured it so damned well on film. You needed silver and the Atlantic to make that possible. And you needed the sun to set before you realized it's just rising for me. You are not my first, I've had many Defiers of Time before you were welcomed to my unproven, often wrong equations. And you never had to be more than needy to stay. You could have been my mercury and helped rise in a capillary too thin to keep me down, even time knew that.
But you don't believe that, ammonium boy.

You believe in the disguise of blessings and ravines and you elope my senses more than my mind. You are no stranger to my relapses and no foe to my demeanor. So you didn't have to know me when my knuckles were just troughs of skin. You did not have to know me when I was suckling on the idea of a mother who didn't impair my speech. You did not have to know me when I did not know you.

All you needed was a day, a compass and an imaginary line.</sub>