I.
       It all boils down to fear.
       
       You just watch. Your depression, your anger, your terror: fear (manifestations of, lovers to, expectations within). I know you have these things and I know what you make of them, because no one knows you quite like I do.
       
       You sit and you are afraid of dying and you are afraid of madness and you are afraid of losing and clutching and grasping too deep, and you are afraid of other people and their unpredictable interactions and words they expect you to reply to, and you are afraid of what the world can do to you and how little you really can do for the world, because trees grow and they die and you bury more seeds but there is nothing there, because you are afraid of nothing.
       
       Don't be embarrassed—shh, shh, please, don't. You can keep going. The seeds are above ground and you have the floor.
       
       Your time isn't up yet.
       
       
              II.
       Let us say you are an actor, an actress, a commander of the stage and at the will and pull of the curtains.
       
       You wear and you tear, and you get teeth pulled and noses shiny, and you wait, and you pace, and you smile at all the right parts and some of the wrong ones, too. There are times, heavy times, when you can't stop staring into the camera, and when you leave the set you wander around and feel it encroaching upon your neck, letting loose jet streams of audiences into your ears, and you can hear them—people, watching you, always watching, waiting for a show and a trick and a lie, something big.
       
       And just like that, you are up for judgment. Your feet are on a stage and you say no, no, they are on the sidewalk, I am walking on the sidewalk! and it says no, no, you are on a stage, you are live on a stage!, and you will be forced to do nothing but listen; listen and walk forward.
       
       It will not escape your head. You will begin to plan things, little significant movements and extra emphasis on words and statements; you will always be trying to do your best, at your funniest, your most charming and personable; and your quiet gross-outs and touchings, your humiliations and human revealings, will make you nervous and ashamed, because you have been commanded by the stage and you are still pressing open the curtains with your teeth.
       
       So act for me, beautiful boy, prettiest girl. I'm watching. I want to see something too big for words.
       
       Show me.
       
       
              III.
        (And all of the butterflies spill out my jaw and down my throat, and they lace the air with one thousand million butterfly breaths, until there is no more oxygen, just rippable wings and tearable antennae.
       
       And they all squish together to form a wall of solid fluttering bashful nervousness, and I roll my head back and try suck them all in, one by one by one, down into my gut like a terrible disease. Alone. Without you.
       
       I will save the prettiest one for your sucker lips, your lover tongue, your square teeth. I will do all that I can.)
       
       
              IV.
       Groom me. I will purr.
       
       I will condense my arms and my legs like spilled milk curdling around the contours of tile. This is what I am: spilled milk. Oops, my penis in your vagina—oops, we're having a baby—here she comes: white, white, white, nearly dead already. Overdue? I can't tell. Oh, it's been so long, so long overdue, I can't even tell. Is she dead? Simply on time, dead on arrival, spot-on the minute we predicted? Oh, I don't even know anymore.
       
       Run your hands along my back and I will shiver and shut up and lie very, very still. Maybe I will object, demur; maybe I will get chills and my mind will wash over in green and I will attempt to pass out, hands laced around my throat. Touch me here and I will bruise. Tickle me there and I will want to cry. Groom me. I will take it lying down, arms folded, mouth closed.
       
       I will accept.
       
       
              V.
       You are nothing, like nothing I have ever seen.
       
       You are beautiful and abashed, you are silk and you are wrinkles, you are diamonds and you are chains, you are ivory and you are needles, you are batter and you are crust. You are absolutely so unique and perfect and new and I will never know another you, no not another you, not again, not ever.
       
       I will never meet you again, not quite like you are now, not so shiny and not so open and not so closed and not so locked and not so tight, so angry, so hushed. We will never understand each other like this again, we will never be so intimate and so happy, so malcontented and so untaken care of.
       
       I promise.
       
       No, you are like nothing I have ever seen—you are nothing, absolutely nothing at all.
       
       
              VI.
       Tell me who you think you are.
       
       I want to know—honestly, really, openly and blatantly. I don't want you to hold back or purse your lips or contract your envies and your wants and your dreams with fat, slinking ummmms. I want you to tell me without descriptions and adjectives—I don't want to know what color your hair should be, if you think you're funny on Wednesdays, where your dream vacation is. That's not it.
       
       I want you to tell me where the first place you grew up was, and where you hope to find it. I want you to tell me when you believed that you had finally found something more, something bigger, some greater purpose and some higher talent, and I want you to tell me where it shattered and blossomed. I want you to tell me if you would rather grow roses or tulips, if you would reach out a yellow-gloved hand to stop them if weeds came up with strangled intentions, or if you would sit back and slurp lemonade and close your eyes and hate yourself. I want you to tell me the first time you slipped up and I want you to tell me the last time you plan to, and I want to know about misconceptions, misbeliefs, misconstructions, and truth.
       
       No—that's not true. None of that is who you are, not really. You're hilarious, you are, a contradiction and a reality and a lie, something I can ignore and have been trying so damn hard not to. No, I don't really want to know about your maturations, your silly stories, your drawn-out answers and your lingering thoughts. You are so openhearted, you are so closed-mouthed, you are such a lie and you are so honest-eyed; you are so funny, my God!, I am in stitches.
       
       Be a dear and tell me what color your eyes are. That's all I really wanted to know, anyway.
       
       
              VII.
       Words are powerful; I have known this for a long time. I longed to reach them, to have them pressed inside my knuckles and shooting outside my fingers, like I could push them into life.
       
       It feels like I have been writing for so long, kick-starting bits of my brain and pushing my hands outside of themselves, trying to reach out of my skin with little more than bones. God, I have been writing for so, so long. It is not my bones or my blood or my head or my soul; it is something else, something so achingly and purely and terribly and wretchedly else.
       
       I have begun lying to people I don't know—doctors, nurses, that woman who gave me neurofeedback when my therapist was sick, receptionists, dentists, curious strangers. It startles me every time it happens but I don't stop—I don't.
       
       I told the woman I want to be a teacher, a teacher, a high school teacher—the nurse believes brown is not my natural hair color. I tell the doctor I want kids, lots of kids, running around my legs and getting lost in their skin, and I tell the smiling lady behind the counter that we moved here for the military.
       
       I want them to think there is more, more, always more, pouring out my veins like fire turned water, distilling under my breath—but no, there is just me, sitting in a chair as she scrapes the blood slowly off my finger, testing for iron and nutrients and health, and I know that if she asked me right then if I had ever hated my body I would've told her no, never, how could she say such a thing?
       
       These words mean nothing to you. Nothing. Don't tell me that they do, or that you feel something here. Don't tell me that you could fall in love with the flow of a cursive pen, that you could bleed on a mess of beautiful poetry, that you could hand over your heart to something so fragile and fickle, something that can be taken back and so easily overwritten and changed and tricked and fooled; have I gotten you, do I have you caught and ensnared?
       
       No, I don't. This means nothing to you. This is something else, something else entirely.
       
       Have you figured it out, my pearl, my jewel? It is not a riddle, a maze, a trick or a scam, never has been and it never will be. This is everything, sweetie, honey, my pot-pie, it is.
       
       This is everything else.
       
       
              VIII.
       She hooks the electrodes to my earlobes like wiry crisp earrings, with two connecting at the crown of my head. They are stuck onto my scalp-skin with a thick, green paste that makes my ears tingle, my head itch, and my neck burn. She sits back and records nonsense on a piece of official paper, scrambled numbers and letters and tell-tale signs that I could never understand.
       
       She asks me: Anxiety—loud or humming? Panic attacks—frequent or infrequent? Mood—good or bad? Obsessing—heavy or light? Eating—normal or shamed? She takes down numbers, she scribbles, doodles my heart and my head all at once. I resist the urge to scratch. I let my legs out loose from underneath me, and I feel like a folding chair, a setup doll.
       
       Okay, she says, and she starts the machine.
       
       With my brain, I command the PacMan imitation. He has a weird name—some sort of chomper—but he is PacMan, the same little guy as always, little multicolored ghosts following his heels greedily, angrily, jealously. He swallows, gulp after gulp of pixilated dots and circles, and with my brain patterns, he smiles, frowns, gets hunted down or speeds up.

       He is nothing, absolutely nothing, a figment warped around the subconscious directions of my brain.
       
       I control him. I control him through the electrodes, with the little grabby reaching fingers of my brain; I control him. I control him, and his fate is mine, all that happens to him is my decision—and I become God, a fortune-teller, a winner, a butterfly and an observer, the air he breathes and is haunted by. My mind-power and my will and my hasty eyes become his master, his lifeline, his string of worries and woes.
       
       I control him, and it makes me his everything.
       
       I am nothing.
       
       
              VII.
       I hate the sky.
       
       I want to rip the sky from its comfortable spot, from its flesh-and-bones resting place, from its angry hangover. I want to pull the sky up like fluttering-eyelash blinds, covering up for what is inside; I want to grab it by its silken predator jawbones and I want to wrench it and let it hang loose and enfolded and maybe even a little dead, and I want to toss it outside, let things bite and pick and eat at it, until it is no more.
       
       Such is my hatred.
       
       I hate the sky for drying out my paper skin, crinkled and worrisome, like it doesn't trust me to do it myself, like I can't let myself go so simply as it can take me. I hate the sky for presenting me with a sun and asking me to come outside and welcome it with arms open like I am receiving messages from an alien and beautiful god, and I don't want to, I don't want to.
       
       I hate the sky for giving me layer after layer of beautiful gray, a gray with a promise: I will tear your house apart, I will beat at your windows and I will send you into a flurry of dizzied panic, and then the thunder storms in like God is having a house party in the apartment above mine and his footsteps bang bang bang terrible and loud and the lightning strikes like a gun with poor aim and I am forgetting, I am forgetting, I am frozen and I am forgotten.
       
       Have your sunsets, your rises and your elongated sighs. Take your revealing and revealed moons, and keep your soggy and tearful romances. I hate it, all of it. I do not want the sky.
       
       Release it.
       
       
              VI.
       I will lose everyone, eventually. You will, too.
       
       Your friends will slip out from underneath you, slippery fish absorbed in the lives that tease before their eyes. Family members will wax and wane, will run away and maybe come back again, if you're lucky and if you're the most tortured bastard I have ever met. Strangers on the street will appear in numbers, on soapboxes, coating your sleep, rolling around with you in bed, hoping for a taste of your skin that you will not give them; and so easily they become disinterested, get up, leave, close the door behind them, and you sit up and say wait, wait!, holding out your forearm flesh with puckered fish fingers—hold on, you can have some, you can have all of me!, but you are talking to a wooden door.
       
       And maybe that is what love is, what we have been worrying about and focusing on, what we have been watching trail by and what we have been dying to bite. When you meet someone and you know they are going to leave and you say no, wait, and you dig your fingers into their shirt flesh, their bruised and battered skin, their torn pants and their teeth, and you say hold on, I want to keep this one! Please?
       
       And maybe God gives you a break; or maybe you falter and accidentally let go, or maybe they struggle and are gone from your tangled, webbed grasp—or maybe you hesitate before you reach out, or maybe you make the decision not to try at all, wondering if you could keep them there with mere willpower and silent confession.
       
       I don't know. Maybe it will transcend both of your lives. Maybe you will hold on so tight and then you slowly lose the strength to hold on but you turn around and your shirt is clutched inside their knuckles, buried so deep in there you realize you couldn't possibly get out if you wanted to. Don't look at me for these answers—I don't know.
       
       You will lose them. I'm sorry, but you will. I will lose them as well, both of us; we will lose all of it. It will happen simultaneously—your grasp will slip and my tongue will blank and the words will be lost and they will leave, running through thickened tree branches trying to get away, trying so hard. They will make it out and we will have lost, and we will be lost.
       
       We will go down together, just us, all alone, without them, without anyone; you and me, just like it's always been.
       
       I'm ready. Reach for me.
       
       
              V.
       I had this dream, and it terrifies me, more than I would like to admit to.
       
       When I woke up it sounded comical, far too comical to be scary, and I wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh until I was simply no more, just stunted liquid voice and a scratchy throat; but when it comes back to me it scares me down to the bones implanted beneath my heart, put there to keep it up straight.
       
       It scares me where it hurts, right in the center of me, pointy tissues and creaking organs. And I think it was a nightmare and I think it was a warning and I think it was just my soul, chewing, ruminating like an old fat dairy cow, unsure of when the farmer will come next and demand more milk.
       
       Didn't I say that was what I was? Milk, spilled, unlidded, freed?
       
       So when I wrap around your house in a painful eye-stricken stream of white, and I swallow up your house and your walls and everything that meant something to you, and I take them all inside and I bloat myself with it, hard and painful and exaggerated, and then I look you up and down and you are shaking and shivering, and I hold you by the shoulders and I try to tell you, shh, please, calm down, it's only liquid, it's only milk, it's only spilled milky watery liquid, that's all, shh, please, calm down, calm down—when I come, will you listen?
       
       Shh, please, calm down, calm down, listen. It's only me.
       
       Terrified.
       
       
              IV.
       I will scream if you groom me.
       
       I will. Loud as I can. I will unload it, moths spilling and tumbling out of my throat, eager to get off the other, to discover a light that can't be found in my stomach or in the claws of my ribs or in the uncracked nut of my heart. I will scream so loud that all of my body will spring to life, like I have been kicked in the furrows on the backs of my legs.
       
       I will scream so loudly that I have forgotten my name again, again and again.
       
       
              III.
       Time is up.
       
       Shhh, don't worry. You probably don't remember most of it, but we had fun. We danced and we danced and you touched my hair and I looked down, ashamed. Maybe you held my jaw and maybe I clutched at your chest, but who can really say?
       
       We did nothing, not really, nothing at all. You told me you were afraid but I said shh, there is nothing to be afraid of, shhh, there is nothing at all, there is nothing here. Shadows, you were staring at shadows. I turned on all the lights for you.
       
       Shh—your time is over, but it was good time, it was time well spent. The camera is gone, you can stop purging, you can stop hiding, nobody is watching. You put up a good show, my treasure, my beautiful blanket, my rain and my sunshine, my star-break and my heart-touch. You were such the actor, the actress, that the stage bended, and for a moment, I thought it was just you and me, us, together, all at once.
       
       And it was so big, I couldn't see it anymore. You made such a beautiful moment, even after Time lost you with his fumbly, grabby fingers—a jealous monster, he is, but he meant no harm. He loses things, people, objects and items always, because he's always screwing up, messing over, and trying to take it back. It's just who he is, by nature, as an individual.
       
       He makes so many mistakes, you know. Forgive him.
       
       
              II.
        (Butterflies: an explosion of butterflies, emptying out of our gutter bodies, into the whipped and chained air. We tried to catch them, one and all, in our mouths, down our spines, inside our stomachs, at the center of us, in the universe. And they were so terrible, so ticklish, so frightening and so invisible—like nothing, down inside, inhabiting us like a big fat tidal wave of nothing. They were an infection, they were, and we swallowed, greedy.
       
       Oh dear, oh honey, beautiful, sweetie, pumpkin-pot pretty-pie booger-snatch—I'm sorry. You were so good, you were, but they didn't make it, not a one.

       I'm sorry; I would've kept them if I could have, if only I had been able to. I would've coated them in heartbeats and breath that they could not forget, and we would have kept them forever. But they died, I'm so sorry, they're gone. I just couldn't hold on.
       
       We lost.)
       
       
              I.
       But you will come back, and I'll be here.
       
       Don't be afraid. The seeds are in my hand and we can save that tree; we can plant new ones, all over the countryside, we can make anew, we can make amends for the one that got away, slipped into the unconscious and hungry grumbled hands of—

       I am confessing to you. I admit it. I am letting go and out, just for you, because I know you are listening, because I know you have to, because I am as much a part of you as you always have been of me. We are born, twin wombs, directional hearts, linked lungs; you are nothing without me, not anything at all.

       Have you figured it out yet, my firecracker, my pot of gold and honey and straw? I love you, my little boy who loves soothing noises, my little girl who never learned to let go. I love you for being me and I love you for being you, always. No one will know you like I do.
       
       So I promise you, my beautiful actor and my divine actress, my model and my poet, my lovely and my hideous: I'll be right here, waiting, like I always have been. After all we've been through, it is the least you can give, the least that you owe, and the most that I can take. Do not be afraid.
       
       Trust me. I am nothing without you.