The Ether

3:21am. i want to be vulnerable with you. i want to bring you into all the universes i create in my head until you forge a universe inside. i want to be known by you in the intricate way a bird shapes its nest a mole probes its tunnels
i want to be explored
i’d like you to to want me to want you. i’d like you to extend your olive branch. i’d like us to intertwine our branches until there is no your and there is no mine. until there is no me and there is no you. i want i want i want i fear my wants are too big. i want to take it all back and go back to a world devoid of touches with no name, gazes with no genre, emotions with no range. i want to not want at all. to dream up a universe where i reside on 84 cherry road with two pigs and one dog in a dark mansion
deeply, passionately, intimately alone.

3:30am. grand stately shade broad green leaves white and gray native to Chicago.
i met a new species last friday. i should not say that i met because i was reintroduced. the forgotten, scrawny brothers of the hickory, the trees that composed my backyard and followed me everywhere have finally reacquainted themselves with my life. mama buys every seed at Lowe’s that reminds her of the lushness of Kenya, and in those remnants sprouted audacious Baby Sycamores. they’re uprooted from their homes eagerly awaiting their next journey just like i was. they’ve unknowingly become my muse. i see myself in uprooted baby sycamores. for mama Kenya is home and US is a placeholder that may alter the trajectory of her family’s wealth. for me, kenya is a distant, disjunct pill of memory that I never swallowed. US is a house I settled For not Into. we’ll feel comfortable enough to set roots in the ground but will forever be reminded that we are the products of initial displacement. how do i remedy the divide?

3:46am. earlier i concocted a sinister solution in my head. i won’t tell you the problem but i’ll take you through the ideation.
suppose i bottled my personalities in a time capsule – each shift portrayed in a new capsule untouched by the variances of the future. and suppose each capsule was fully accessible and transformable. one capsule could transform you into a former version of yourself or provide an avenue for reflection. earlier i decided that the solution would be a two pronged approach that would allow me to one, encapsulate this identity that i have begrudgingly assumed, and two, shapeshift (mentally) into a persona that once was so impossibly, irrevocably me. it’s sinister and twisted that i would trade me in for myself but i wonder if the old me, resilient and reserved, could counter the new me, unsteady and undeserved. would she see me now, a person phased, and lend me her ease? or would she see me now, a person belittled, and turn her gaze?
i wonder.

4:00am. im working on it. being okay with being alone. loneliness is a sage green sky with glimpses of gold and ribbons stained chartreuse and i’ll paint her with a silk-soaked brush whose bristles bear the burden of time. loneliness is two friends whose palms startle static with the joint understanding that one will love the other more. loneliness is a mural of scars carefully engraved beneath the flesh of my organs. Loneliness was Stolen from me.