Lessons From the Kissing Booth

For a while I kept a list of the things you left on my doorstep. A compass and a kitten and three headless birds, a book about fish, a cracked watch, two candy canes, a treasure map of Atlantis, and an old copy of Newsweek. I was looking for patterns, I guess, like watching snow on an old motel television screen and waiting for shapes to form. Better to try and find constellations in my own freckles than meaning between the fingers of someone else.

And then I considered, for a time, the weight of my self inside the eyes of everyone else, lingering inside of a vitreous humor and swirling darkly at the close of an eyelid. So I made a list of rings and ripples, of velocity and weight and echoes and dresses, of how much light is reflected by a smile versus a frown. Realizing even then that our influence is only real if someone else realizes that it's there.

I've been thinking about the ice in Greenland, and how there turned out to be all these tunnels underneath that are helping the melting ice slide further and faster into the sea, all of these empty places we didn't even know about undermining a structure already under attack from all the other sides. We can make videos of that, but we can't stop it from happening.