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For a year’s worth of words, you’re lagging behind. Each press is a pull, fingers on keys or pens that bleed through to the other side. There’s a lull in your lexicon, you’re rusty and reticent, clothed in metaphor, cliché and lesser idioms. They’re in your head now, on rotation they chase each others’ tails as you drift through the days, alternating between refuge and reputation. You’re fickle and falling and it shows in your syntax, stunted and struggling through the simplest of sentences, sloppy with even the most basic of literary devices.

Wake to late night comedy, give up, turn to podcasts, and start to be what you always were, nothing but a white lady at heart. Thoughts form pleas, predictions to repeat and review, not as far from a prayer as you’d like them to be.

Let me be the person who moves out of the way to let cats drink off the sidewalk. Let me be one to say no, insist, the single wrong coloured tulip, someone who makes change happen by any means necessary, who chooses to believe you can tell a person by the way they kiss, upside down.

For a second, or a week, or a year we spoke the same language, we spoke that way that you do. It’s not much beyond a premonition, a suggestion, a trick or twist for someone who doesn’t trust in fate, an arrest at the building of walls that persist and persuade, mutable and manipulative. Put your faith in independent variables, in the goodness of others, in your vacancies and the need to share them. Share with someone who knows, who quotes Neil Young and inhales, who corrects their sight with a middle finger who breathes in your language, however guttural, or primitive, or annoyingly philosophical.

Or don’t. Flee to find yourself in the persistence of one who clings even as she runs, who expects forests to stay the same, who rails against NO TRESPASSING that grow while she’s away, searching for plants without precondition that don’t dictate but invite, searching for giving trees and people who plant them.

Let me know what it’s like to be bored, teach me the things that matter, like the ratio of fingertip width to distribution of vertebrae, how to quiet a teenager, the probability, in a city of millions, of seeing the same strangers in the same day.