/ god, happy birthday, alex

justice is shouting until someone gets tired of the noise, and affection notices it coming down the street, forgets her name, thinks, damn, and turns in the opposite direction, puts the navel oranges back onto the streetside stand and silently walks away, so that you should worry when it gets too quiet. when favorite shapes are the lines on your back after awkward sleep there is something like shouting in your head, like, 'OH YES, THIS IS IT,' but in reality, you are very quiet, as the light filters through the buildings on the east side streets, and this light is very quiet, but still somehow hits your eyes like shouting. it is glorious to wake to such apparent contradiction. silence and shouting, touch and confusion.

sea and sky, however, are not opposites, as we might believe, both blue and the cause of it, neither impermanent nor pertinent, both solid when very cold. we turn the heat down and open the windows, wake freezing, but covered in sweat. this is contradiction, the two opposite ends of the magnet overcoming what's left of reasonable force with fingertips and abandoned determination.

"What if you meet him here?" he asks. "Right here on the street, right here where no one is expecting you?"

"I will keep walking."

"What if he calls out to you?"

"I won't hear it," she says. "And it won't be a lie. I don't hear anything when we do this."

Even the movie tickets are wasted, she explains. Faces and lights, breathing, mostly. If anything, the darkness of the theater. The loudness of their breathing is the only contradiction acknowledged.

You sleep so loudly, she thinks.

That's not possible, he says. My dreams begin before I even close my eyes. I can hear the sound of my own sleep, and it is like shouting into the steady breeze of your contradictions. What can you mean when you say this, she asks, and how can you not know, he counters, and, oh, it's just that I cannot stand it when the world doesn't shrink away, I keep thinking I won't hear the traffic, or the loud conversations at the next table or the screaming of these doubts when I'm trying to enjoy these few moments, and he says, I know, and now it's over. Again, she says.

When will I hear you again? she asks.

There is shouting in my head at this very moment. Can you not hear it?

I can't. i want to, i want to, i want to.

then i will be very quiet. can you hear that?

i can, i can.

then now. you will hear me now, and it will be like it never ended, not when the traffic dies and you remember to draw the shades and the shouting of the daylight, cruel, cruel, won't interrupt the sleeping of whomever breathes into the lines along your back because you want someone to sing this to you.

it has to be very quiet so that no one could hear. and loud enough so that you could not.

i could, i could.

i could.