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The favelas light up at night. She sits on walkways in chairs that once carried milk bottles, waiting for breezes that come as often as a way out of a hard situation. She’s the color of all things right, her hair the color of a Nina Simone song, her smile the reason I trip over a crack. She laughs and I speak English. “Excuse me,�� came out before knowing she’d have no idea what I’m embarrassingly muttering.

The favelas light up at night. Some puddles are deeper than the other, some power lines lower than the others, some hills a little steeper. She’s gorgeous, brown, big-eyed, and mine for as long as I can keep her. The moon shines so bright, stars become insecure. I count three.

The favelas light up at night. We walk and play charades, filling in all the words we can’t speak. She tells me a story about a dog, a bicycle, and what I think is an old woman with a fish. I tell her about the Nancy Wilson, Etta James, Stan Getz, and she laughs at my attempt at “Girl From Ipanema�� in Portuguese. I keep singing to keep her laughing. She keeps laughing to keep me smiling.

The favelas light up at night. I count the lights and she points to hers. “That one,�� she says, more like a question, waiting for me to approve her English. I nod, pointing with her. She smells sweet like soap and fresh air and coconut water. She smells like that I was on the F train headed for 63rd St in New York with five friends all headed uptown. That night I never wanted the laughing to stop. She smells like that.

The favelas light up at night and I imagine how big our kids�� smiles would be and how much time we’d spend in Virginia for holidays. The favelas from a distance look like the Christmas trees I had as a child, some lights out, most lights on, still beautiful. This woman from a distance looks like everything I want to rest my hand, heart, and head on after climbing up to see her again and again. She’s far up and far out, man. She’s worth every short breath I take when finally reaching her kitchen table and tossing my shoes to the other end of the room. She’s it.  

The favelas light up night to be beautiful until sunrise. She doesn’t want to be here forever.

She keeps the favelas outside my window lit. I know which light is hers, and I wait for them to flicker three times for goodnight, sad I didn’t have the heart to tell her I won’t be back for a while.

Love can be the shallowest shit you drown in. The water won’t clear my nostrils. There will be too much coke. Too much jasmine. Remnants of months old sage and the smell of days old water touching my neck, then my chin and cheeks, then my lips. Cold water waiting for me to make up my mind.

Under pounds and pounds of a knitted blanket a grandmother made somewhere in America, she discovered he was too much like her father. 

She had much practice leaving men after this discovery, but never her father. She had his eyes. 

You kicked the dog then played the victim. 

And from here, there will never be anything written about you that will be understood by the geniuses; only the men who sit on crates by a store, discussing the teachings of Ernest and Julio Gallo. 

There was this couple on the train today. It was easy to see he loved her because he wouldn’t look away. She kept talking, looking at him, then to the floor, then back to him, smiling, moving her face closer, staring at his lips. And he reached for a water bottle in his bag with his free left hand. He never looked away.

I knew it was love because he struggled to open the bottle with one hand, never looking away or missing a punch line. Then he offered her the first sip.

Your face is faultful
You are home
You are home

Birthdays and anniversaries and being together for 5 months next Wednesday aren’t important. There are promotions you’ll get at work and I won’t be home waiting to congratulate you with flowers and edible arrangements on your accomplishments, but I will send a text saying how proud I am of you, and it’ll be true. I’m quite forgetful, and when you asked for another pint of Talenti ice cream from the market, I didn’t hear you. I was busy writing a note I was trying to remember from the shower.

Weeks will go by and I won’t ask you out, but I’ll gladly accept your invitation. Time in my world doesn’t often exist, and when it does, it can be manipulated. I swear to god, two weeks passed with a single closing and a single opening of my eyes.

This is romance: you in sweats, me in sweats, us in winter on a couch. A grey sky but bright home, burning wood from a neighbor’s house to remind us of all the Halloweens we’ve known. I give you a place to bury your feet in exchange for quiet to finish my work; to finish something I’ve been working on since we met or made love. It’ll be about how your hair smelled when it was trapped between the back of my head, locking your face closer to mine. Romance is sharing all my developed characters with you, and all their well-developed flaws.

Ask me about their clothes, and their childhood, and what they’d order from the bars they frequent and you’ll find pieces of you. You’ll find I was listening when you thought I wasn’t. You’ll see that even when I was dead tired, I paid attention to what I told you wasn’t important.

You’re never allowed to be so sensitive that insecurity swallows you when I ask, “were you the one I told that to, or was it someone else?�� Say yes or no, and understand.

I won’t always answer the phone, but I can always be reached. Spoken words, as you’ll find time and time again when you want to sit and have serious conversations about our future, get trapped in the middle of my throat, or, and this is rare, they come all at once when we’re not so sober. I am a writer, I am going to write, but when I speak, it will always be with intention.

Loving others will be easier, more convenient, but others can’t know you like I’ve known you. They can’t speak about you without cliché’s. Their admiration for you is like every other admiration that has ever existed. You’ll ask, “What do you love most about me,�� because the question in inevitable. You’ll be satisfied when they tell you “your spirit is kind, and you’re passionate about what you believe in.��

You have a stubborn curl your fingers find when you think others aren’t looking, and you slide into the warm spot my body left when I hop out of my side of your bed. I know your neck and your wrists. I’ve studied you. I can line you up with “everybody else�� you think I’ve grouped you with and find you because I know everywhere you spray every fragrance you own. I know what you smell like fresh out of the shower, and after running in the rain. You are found in pieces of every character, every scene, every song, and every half-decent adjective I’ve created since meeting you.

I am a writer. Forgive this cliché, but I know you better than you know yourself.  

You tell people “Feng Shui�� but the bed is here now because I stayed over when it was on the other side of the room and hated how early the sun broke into my eyes. I moved it immediately because I needed that relationship to work. Because I knew there’d be more nights like the last. I claimed my side of the bed because it’s closer to the clock, and you worked before me, and worked when I wasn’t, but you were irresponsible when it came to shutting it off, so I did. And I woke you up.

I woke up today to the sound of fancy wooden hangers with metal necks on wooden rods. The shuffling and rustling of clothes and a windbreaker you refuse to dispose of. I woke to the sound of your voice speaking into a receiver, telling the girl on the other end, “he’s waking up,�� and the sound of her loud approval and giggles.

With my eyes closed I could find the bathroom, the toilet, the q-tips and the tweezers. I can move the shower knob so the temperature is perfect on the first turn; for me, for you, and for us both. I’m never hungry here because there’s never food, only water, and so little of that, but I’m almost always satisfied.

There’s comfort on that side of the bed, in those little balls of carpet weaving themselves under my toes, and in hot water falling from the top of my head, down my neck and shoulders, landing at my feet. Comfort in knowing you know how long to keep your legs locked into mine and how long to let me sleep. You know when and how to wake me, and you suggest food after showers. I wonder where I’ve been for the thousands of days that have passed between the last time I slept in this spot and now. I don’t know. I find the comfort and beauty and fear of waking up in the familiar.

Betty -

You don’t approve of drugs, I get it. But I feel everything when I’m high. My body is a pulsar, a wonderland of emotions you never thought you’d find and became fine with. I feel the earth spinning and I’ll wake up or never sleep and tell you exactly what time it is in any part of the world. I feel the stillness of the fading summer and I remember me at 11 wondering when I’d reach an age when yards and catching chicken would no longer be fun. I cry for him. I feel the tears running down my mother’s face each time she left me somewhere to enjoy a few moments without me. I feel the hundreds of kisses she planted on my face each week.

I feel this drip in the back of my throat.

I remember the many women before you, all who loved me in their own way. I remember that one the most. I feel every stroke that pushed me deeper into Her and every second that passed pushing me closer to leaving. I felt her 3000 miles away and I needed her closer. The only somebody I ever needed and I felt her slipping and did nothing. I feel Phil Collins.

I feel my left nostril fighting for air.

My heart moves to blackness. It navigates its way through a void. There’s a  lilt. I feel too much. I can still feel your flesh, the coolness of your nails, and the air crawling under the door bringing with it the smell of sauteed garlic and fabric softener. It’s sweet like your breath on my shoulder, your lip barely touching my neck, your eyelashes batting against my ear every 14 seconds, and your sadness. You keep cumming reluctantly. You know each time means we’re closer to sleep. I feel sleepy.

I feel the low that’s on it’s way.

Betty, I don’t want to feel anymore. It scares the shit out of me. Beneath my feet, roots have learned to water themselves. Did we swallow magnets?

To always be hanging by a string. We can make it a few more weeks, and if we’re lucky, maybe a couple of years. But this isn’t a forever thing. We watch this string like we watch spiders suspended from webs from ceilings. 

Oh how tangled. 

We won’t know each other in old age, but we know each other now. Now, we’ll walk naked and take ownership of our favorite soft spots on each other. We’ll drain every fragment of life source, then renew. We’ll fuck at the end of this string suspended from the ceiling until it breaks.