Renewal

I keep renewing your library books. It is so easy. 

A simple kindness, an intimacy

I extend to you unknowingly. A fear of all this

bureaucracy, small infrastructures of the personal still bridging us even

now, causing disruptions in our own disruption, tying us through

capital, technological, digital space. not all the worlds have caught up 

to the one in which we now live. I have not caught up to the world

I am now living in. In which your syllables make me seasick

everything blurred like the spinning of a washing machine 

is the water everywhere, drowning me or keeping me clean?

Small deaths I knew were coming. The prescience less of a gift

than an inevitability. How can I hold you without you knowing that I am holding you?

Are you holding me too? Why is it so hard to talk to you and feel I am talking to you?

Wading through walls of styrofoam, exhaustion, sunken-in sadness, 

ink-stained hands the telltale sign I cannot ignore. What to do when you do not know what you want?

What to do when you don't know how to make it better? What to do when what you want may not 

make it better? Words feel just like words now. Empty and shapeless. Too polite.

Casual is a tone, a voice adopted for a while. All the while searching for how to say something real.

To you, to anyone, about this. To myself lying in bed. To my friends as they come into being.

Just letters, the awkwardness in between so heavy with all that is not communicated.

All I can do is renew your library books, drop your birthday card in the mail. 

It is true. I am trying.