This morning on the way to campus, while I carried my coffee and tried not to slosh it all over my white shirt, just like the idiot words I'd stored up and then spilt all over you without necessary reason, a kid from (what I can only guess is) the school for the challenged ran up and out of the drive and passed me on the sidewalk. His feet pumped against pavement like freedom.

Later in my head, I saw him burst into furious flames of attained desire like sugar under high heat. No chains no hands to drag him back to where he so desperately spun from.

Words spin and go until I find myself over-exposed. That chemical smell of the water bath in the darkroom in a memory stuck in the back of my throat. Words like bright lights to burn in. Exposing unmasked areas. Nothing like a test strip to save you paper and time and the swell of curses from doing it all wrong the first thousand tries. The rejects spinning and sloshing in the running pail behind you in the dark to remember not to forget how it all goes, next time.

I write to her and say, Mom, I don't know what I do what I've done this nightmare version of myself that doesn't want to stop making everything luster-less. In strange moments of honesty, I tell her that I don't want this or anything else about me to deliver up your locus of regret. I cut and paste numbers corresponding to nothing into documents full of words that fly by nonsensical like boys on fire until it's my turn to go.

Walking too long through this city in the afternoon is like baking a cake with your head in the oven. I walk until I feel like I might fall down. Until I lose track of where I am and where I've been. Turn toward what I think might be the direction of home. These legs like those wavy heat lines that drive up from asphalt in summer. Stop by the building next to the building I used to work in that I don't have a name for and throw up into some random toilet, twice. In my head, I have one of those meta-conversations with myself (and the grey and blue tiled floor) about just how much I hate throwing up in foreign bathrooms, especially pubic ones. Wash my hands and face with cold water, and walk the rest of the way home.

I check for signs of fire-boy, but only find a drunk stinking man asleep on one of the benches near where he arrived, and the Indigo Girls sing into my ears not to take a picture -- to remember it in my head -- and then you're there -- and they sing something about a heart, but I can't hear it over the buzzing sound of construction at the church as I pass.

He is crazy about you and that needs to be enough to let you know he only means things in a good way. Try not to worry; all will be well if it isn't already. Just be sure you don't cry all the time. He will get tired of that. Love and kisses and keep me posted, I would hate to have to fly back there to knock some sense into you two. --Mom

I stop then. Remember what if feels like to breathe and what that means about love these days. Write with permanent marker onto my left forearm:
don't cry all the time.