It was a quiet night but it wasn’t that night. You said I should come home with you, but then you offered me a shirt. Two shirts. A choice of shirts. You thought it meant something that I chose the softer one, but I thought everything meant something else. I lay on the couch but only in part. Nothing would be clear to anyone that way. Still, you asked if I wanted to come in and of course I forgot your shirt on the edge of the bed. Only I had to ask you to kiss me. No. “I think you should kiss me.” That’s what I said.

I don’t remember much, but I remember this much:

“What do you want?”

“I want to not have to think for a while.”

We didn’t wake up until she called again, this time on my phone. You left the room to call her back on yours, and I covered myself up with pillows tip to toe.

“You made a fort. Just like you said you would.”

“I’m keeping day away.”

I buy your coffee. You buy my croissant.

Just like everyone else we almost don’t make it to the lake. I wear her bikini. She wears her underwear. I am wishing things were different.

I am in the water on the dock pinning and re-pinning my hair, finding the swings but not you. You are reckless you are trying to catch fish with a plastic bag and then you are actually doing it and then you are letting them go. You are disappearing and you have fallen asleep with a book on your chest but not me. We forget to take pictures.

We are walking back to the lake diving in and then out and then back again. We look up at the moon and into the water at the moon and then out the window to a night that is soon the city sky. We are side by side but we are busy looking back so we are looking everywhere but at each another.

It was nighttime and the movie was over. We had been sitting almost as if but not, and now we were falling behind. I knew I wanted to break off but I couldn’t tell if you did, so instead we were trudging along, asking one another over and over again what the plan was.

You said something but I didn’t hear, so I gave you a look that must’ve meant something else to you as well, because I caught you staring at me for a minute before you popped the question.

“What do you want?”

I looked at the city and I looked at you. At the sky and you. At the giggling clusters of girls standing in the middle of the street, and then you. I took a deep breath and then another and then I smiled.

“Me? I want everything.”

You moved me to Brooklyn in the middle of the night, two weeks into July. I am Florida and you are Chicago, but that’s never mattered and it didn’t then, either. You are Chicago through and through and Florida is a no-place so maybe it’s the same for me and that’s why we are the same way about things. Were the same way. This was when we didn’t need much. This was, maybe, when we were both Northern California. This was before I became New York and you became Paris. This was before things got hard.

It was the middle of the night and it was hot. There isn’t a better word for it. Hot. True hot, no flourishes. It was a small building but I lived on the top floor and there were only stairs. So many stairs, so many bags. Too much baggage (as usual) and you carried all of it (repeat).

There was hot and there were beating hearts and there were aches but they weren’t the heart sort, not yet. We weren’t there yet. We were animals, then. We think of sex as something animal and it can be but animals have their timing, too. There was hot and there were heartbeats and there wasn’t speech and there wasn’t sex but there was sleep. It was the only thing we could do.

And on the next day, we found a way to do something else. Speech hadn’t been invented yet but exchange value had and already its call was strong enough to pierce through our animal brains and we made our way to the store without talking. Inside was new and so were we. The air conditioners were stacked and staggered and they were beige and grey and gruesome but they were beautiful. Because they were invisible because they were on. I remembered the word desperation and how money worked and for once it made me happy because for once happy felt like something I could buy. I spent more than I could for more than I needed because I remembered those things so well.

It was too much and you carried it all (repeat). Back with the hot and the stairs and the heavy and the heartbeats but when we closed our eyes some small part of us lit up with the afterglow of fluorescent lights and so when we’d forget ourselves we’d close our eyes and things seemed simpler, then. There was a box and boxes are to be opened. There were pieces and pieces are to be put together. There was a space and an object that fit inside it. There were holes and there were things that filled those holes. And then there it was.

We stood up eyes closed arms open side by side and our animal selves began to melt, dripping off, rivulets now flowing into floorboards. Soon we remembered what talking was and then clean and then holding. We were quick learners and we were clever and because we had selves again I made bad jokes about Prometheus in reverse. And because you loved me you laughed anyway (repeat).

Things were going faster and faster and it was the next day and we sat on the couch with computers. There was a pop and I looked up and suddenly things began to get slow again. The sky was falling. You tried to hold it up and I grabbed you and pulled you down with me. We tried to become smaller but we held up our hands. The cat ran under the bed because she was the smartest of all. The sky was crashing down on top of us and with it came books, thousands of books, radios, telephones, televisions, everything now a mountain of paper and plastic and metal and glass, jagged spikes peaking over my head.

We were lucky with our bruises and paper cuts. The hum of the cool false air could be heard now, a backdrop to the boom of beating hearts. We stared into the hole in the ceiling. We couldn’t see anything. There was nothing to see. There was nothing to say. We began to excavate.

Things got harder, then.