Now,
lift one circle.
Raise it up high, as tall as you are, and then more.
Raise it up so high your eyes strain and completely lose sight of it; raise it up so high your fingertips and palms can feel the tinges of crisp air;
hold it so that birds may fly beneath it, and entire rivers will run their course entirely within its perimeter;
hold it so it can hover over passing planes, so it may memorize the stars in curvature.
Where you soar, way up there, higher than the clouds — is you.
At your feet, far, far away, where I still lay, where I encircle the grass and the trees and the sea, where nature and people and houses and cities and animals and hope and travail and life and death and everything all are— is me.
And
wherever your shadow spills over me —
in some lights… nipping at my edges, then doubling me over in slow motion, though in most moments only modestly presenting, eerily distorting the trace of my outline and creating an uneasy presentation which leads to whispers, which leads to rumors,
and in other lights… leaving me with a mere pittance of myself, the light inside me withered down to a sliver, my light that I use to see grasping for existence,
and in rare moments of cataclysm… painting me to appear gone to every knowing thing, enveloped entirely in the image of you reigning over me, the utter absence of whatever I am,
— is the Venn diagram of us.
And
if you tilt your head,
to the side,
ever-so-slightly,
and away from one another,
as we both have,
our circles
d
i
s
a
p
p
e
a
r,
into thin lines.
And at this angle,
and at this distance,
you and me become utterly imperceptible to every knowing thing,
and you and me see far out into the vastness of what else could be.
From this angle, you and me are witness to more than ever before, and we can reckon the limits of our boundaries; we can imagine beyond the grass and the trees and the sea; we can become rapt by all that can be new: people, houses, lives and deaths, cities and animals.
And from this distance, you and me will become absent to you and me,
unburdened by any link.
From this distance, and from this angle, our worlds can rage on—a pleasant routine, a morning coquette, in a smothering broil, in the vast of dark,
and our thin lines will hang there,
undetectable,
forgotten by all,
forgotten by us,
remembered only through the shadows dancing on by,
visible from all angles, and all distances.
