Daichi Takagi

The Moon and the Trees I'd like to be dumb as a tree. That's probably the most elegant, most sophisticated, most solid way to be. Nothing inside but slow, calm work. Tasks being completed, a little photosynthesis, a separate peace. Twists and turns wouldn't do much except make me prettier. My tears would taste like maple syrup. We were in the woods, trying not to get too dirty. We were talking, he was worried about the future, I didn't understand. "Whatcha mean, make a living? To pay some stupid made-up rent?" "I wanna have a career, I don't wanna fuck up my life." "Career? You're just gonna get fired, turned loose, left behind. Then what?" "I'm building something here, baby." "Like a building? Ozymandias. Sands of time. Tears in the rain." "I wanna be in love." "You ain't right now?" "We ain't married." "Dump, disrespect, divorce, destroy, delete. What a ride. Let's do it again." We were just two redneck kids. Jamie, his next boyfriend, accidentally shot him in the eye with a bb gun pellet that bounced off a tree and poked a hole in his iris. The doctor gave him a shiny glass marble to stick in there, but after a while it got dull and scratched and didn't move so smoothly. I remember his beautiful brown moons, and recently at night they've been floating up through the trees in Central Park, glowing like spots on a ghost moth, fluttering out of the pine barrens rooted in my head, leaving those shitty strip mall provinces for good. I was the one that left for the city. He didn't make it out. He snorted a bad line the second month of lockdown, and after that I quit drugs and falling in love with boys forever. But maybe it wasn't Jamie in Jersey, maybe it was Shawn in Virginia, making out down in the empty dunes on Fort Story, the dead whale that had washed up on the beach behind us starting to stink, the sandy pines framing the mirrored moons, one clear and crisp and the other caressed by the constant trouble of the wind. I tried to imagine him that way, stressed but simply lovely. Instead of a blind addled cyclops, looking at me like I was Metro-dysseus, offended and towering above me, my high heels clicking in the cave as I ran away from all those deals I didn't make. I slipped out on an echo that I heard again when Sophie fell down in front of the super moon under the Acropolis, and as I watched other people's hearts break, I knew why. Some people say not to get too close to the sun, but I think the moon is much more dangerous. Staring at that hotel window, as the morning went from black as a cat to Aegean saphire, the curlicue of the wrought iron getting intimate with the curling fingers of smoke from your next last naughty cig, we know they're not coming back. Not the hot ones, not the smart ones, not the funny ones, and certainly not the dead ones. —ME

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