Im sitting on a curb and my head is in my hands

What do you need from me little guy, I ask

I don’t respond. I don’t think I’m listening and anyways it wouldn’t matter. I’m never understood, listened or not. 

Where are we right now? We’re outside of a soccer game, or a basketball game, and I’m a failure once again. 

Did we lose? 

Yeah.

Because?

Because I wasn’t trying hard enough. 

And you want me to try now?

I want to never feel this heat on my forehead this too-tiredness to untie my too-tight shoes. I want to catch my breath so that I can cry but more than anything I want to have won. 

Wow gosh. That’s really a lot. I’m still listening. 

No you’re not

Can sit on the curb with you?

Sure.

I sit. My head is still in my hands. 

Isn’t that just making your head hotter, holding it down towards the hot black asphalt like that?

I’m not responding, and that’s fair. I may love him but leading questions veiled advice isn’t very kind.

Do you love me? I ask

I have to breathe now, because it takes sincerity and wit to answer correctly. This is a tough question and it’s a pure right now that is most needed, most certainly deserved. To rush into a yes would be to cast a shadow of no, like a force that doesn’t flow but is pushed, or kicks

I hold myself in this state of non-answer so that I don’t have to respond, and suddenly there’s another person standing above us on the curb. It’s a lot easier for all of us now that he’s blocking the sun. He can handle it, the back of his neck is burnt black anyways. 

I do love you

I look at my fingers to make sure that this is still the body responding, not the mind, haha. no, not the wit or the courage but the gush, the water rush, the constant flush of yes,

I do love you

I’m proud of myself. Look at what I’m doing. I’m writing my story. It wasn’t that hard. 

But now theres’s a burning in my stomach as and it’s traveling up my back, tightening my neck and twitching at my toes. It’s this feeling of realizing, of making something real, of making something new. It might be freeing, melting, thawing, warm, but it sure does burn. 

I wonder now, after the after of creation

I wonder if I’m good enough. 

Hey, are you still on the curb, or are we elsewhere, I call out, into the darkness plinked with moist light. 

I raise a glass into the air, cold. Cold water seeping through the cup, past the skin of my palm, down my arm, and into my chest, where a cold river ran once, whose bed is in love with this dewy goblet in the sky. 

I realize that I is the most freeing of the pronouns. I cannot contradict itself. No matter what, it bends and adapts and there is nothing I cannot say that is not a product of itself, a result of love and care. I is a system of infinite maneuverability, of negative space bounded by self-knowledge, with the freedom to make itself anew wherever it desires, to realize its limits whenever it so sees fit.