We Speak Absurdity Here

"Being."

"I was as warm and moist as a spring sunset on an applecart."

Jesse returned and hugged me and petted my hair, having had the break from me necessary to recontextualize our experience, to leave all awkwardness in the past. He was more attractive in the conventional sense than before, having let his surf-blond hair grow in wide stripes of yellow down past his eyes, sticking out under his baseball cap, and I found this disappointing. We quickly ran out of things to say to each other, and I left him sitting outside, talking to Sam.

"You will go to the moon. But not all of you will go to the moon.
You will leave behind parts of the rocket that have held the fuel you have burned.
When you arrive at the space station, you will be in just the tip of the rocket."

I dream all night of sex, hours of sex and tangled bodies. The bodies are friends' bodies. All day I am chaste and all night I dream of sex. In the morning, as I wake up slowly, I feel exposed, as if during my waking one might peek in and see what my thoughts are.

"After a time, you will depart again in the moon lander. The moon lander has no means
of self-propulsion; it will get a push from the space station. That big push will send the moon lander all the way to the moon."

Lost dances in the kitchen and I listen to her tapping. She is cooking Popeye's chicken in the microwave. It's so odd for me to meet her, me who had considered her existence before meeting her in the flesh. I know so much about her and she doesn't appear to know anything about it. She told the administrators here that her name was Hallie Burton. She went down to the Block to get mounds of food for her "seventeen hungry children." She's the headmistress of the house of Lost Boys and Girls. I wonder what it means to be lost, in this sense.


"Once you get to the moon, you will not have any means to get home."