Jarrod Sage
i heard you on the phone until the sun rose several days in a row: through blinds, morning rays would begin to glow, but i paid them no mind—it didn’t matter at all that our calls stretched across half the country’s span; that you lived two hours in the past; that you sat and bitched about San Francisco traffic as i lay watching you become naked with each word to which i listened; that in the passing of every minute we simmered in the languor of the other’s laugh, unable to catch ourselves becoming less of strangers, our hands drawn to clasp, our time slipping by as the seconds ticked on, piling infinite like sands; those sands building dunes separating me from you, you from me—separating us from we such that these two lovers estranged simply lazed and daydreamed endlessly of how they might meet; of how we might kiss; of how our hearts and minds might mix against a backdrop of Bay Area mist, two bodies shrouded, cloudy, blending at the pigments of pink lips as each our skin became perforated, as if the planes of two orbits had intersected or how atomic collision begets fluorescence; how two thousand miles of intercalating distance really should have been more like two inches, of how two should fuse to one and one to none and in our dissolution we could become both everything and nothing together all at once—forgetting our unity was illusory, because maybe it didn’t have to be: i thought maybe by believing that laws like general relativity didn’t apply to you and me, that maybe i could make spacetime warp; that maybe you could ignore how distance is a blunt force which buckles as mountain ranges corrugate the space from me to you; that maybe your voice was so sweet and smooth i could stay awake too late for just one more day; that while i drift to sleep, maybe you could pretend reading poetry to me when my midnight bends might just keep our hearts mixed; and that after such attempts, you and i could defend such nonsense: beliefs in this certainty that it would never end; that still you and i might blend; that i’d override in six quick weeks so far from your side the physics of all causality through just a few simple tricks in cellphone instant messaging. that your light, fluoresced, could compress all manner of dimensions enough to cull oxides and rusts crusted in the months since i’d felt your touch—just because we fell hard—as if what’s proximal in time could be just as far. that the love of two could be enough if bound by only sound and light, like how two lone drivers might communicate at night. like it didn’t matter at all we couldn’t bridge that gap. like it was okay you still lived two years in your past. that your image in only screens shone. that i could only hear your voice through a telephone.