liham/lihim

three.

There's a place where you are bankrupt. There's a place where your hair is shaped like a triangle. There's a place where time goes backwards but my grief is the same and I mourn you when you arrive at infancy, another place where grass is yellow and it rains diamonds and you've married a man who owns a hundred thousand teapots. He makes them for a living and you run away with me in the fall, because I am his humble cupbearer and my eyes somehow captivate yours at the lunch table when I offer you a sandwich. There is a place where you own three dogs, and one of them is named Bess. Another where the sun circles our moon and you have left me for someone else and I stare up at a dazzling night feeling nothing but a cold, unkind wind. There are at least a dozen places where your father is not King and my father is not Death and we have run away to sharpen our knives and pick mangoes and sell the occasional flower at our fruit stand. In every place, we are running.

There is a place where I am not in love with you. Where you do not exist. Where my mother is a farmer in the middle of a heat-ridden, flatland province and I am sitting eagerly at our dinner table while she stirs a pot and hums some tune about missing somebody at Christmas. She is off-key, and I am some kind of happy there. I am some kind of happy when I am alone and I am dancing with your ghost. There, you are only a phantom, a spirit of my joy.

We are not in that place. You are asking me what my favorite color is. I am about to answer yours.