The Most Lonesome Thing

Creaking and rocking, I am making little echo noises in the void of my own self, the only thing that exists. The world is an undulating thing, made of sand and hope, made of gritty fear. I am a red desert, stretched out in perfect dunes, as far as the eyes can see. You are a ghost, with whispering footprints that are swept away when I breathe in. I never hurt you, you are no solid thing. I can slip through your skin; there’s nothing there. You are a dream, a fragment, a wish, a passing thought.

I am floating in the silent certainty of only me. You cannot reach me here, you cannot touch me, because your fingers are made of white sand, the dust of my own internal experience; nothing.

I wonder what it’d be like to pour myself into you, to spill over you in little particles, slip through the cracks of you, enter your pores. Imagine us in a rusty VW bus leaking sand. We’re in the desert, dunes rolling and rippling and sighing as far as the eye can see. We live in a bus, with teacups, full of sand. We make love in a bed like a dried up sea, fine, orange dust that billows all around us like steam, makes your face look far away, I can see you dissolving into it. We sit cross-legged, naked and dusty, and I paint your body with wet strokes, trying to feel your skin, my fingers hopeful and searching. We stand in the desert hand in hand and watch as a huge dark wave comes rising up and crashes over us, rains against my flesh, your flesh, these flimsy little forms. We erode in seconds, dissolve into the absolute chaos, swallowed up into the explosive whirlwind of fiery sand.

I am the most lonesome thing, the only thing, heaving in the dark black void, the things that can never be known. I am writhing, in a bed. The sunlight is begging to crawl through the windows, through the cracks. You are not real. I can slip through your skin and find nothing.