our capacity to demand, for reassurance, for justice, for hope, endless, unbound, always thrown in the face of someone else. we expect reciprocation, we expect a volley in return, we expect to hear the tenor of sincerity, we expect like for like, love for love, hope in return for despair, we demand and rend and tear and claw until we get something, not just anything, but that which belongs to us, that mirrors, a pound of flesh for kindness, sutures for this wound.

Even pebbles add up to boulders, shaky as they are. You make the effort, mountains out of molehills, a pile of whispers into conversation. What matters is the steady pace, even if at a crawl. It all amounts to something, it all adds up. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or a magnum opus, everything big starts out tiny. even the body succumbs to a virus.

you can be wistful all you want, but the thought gums up the gears, stops any and all traction whatsoever. whatever, he said and put his beer down and fumbled through the crowd, jostling for escape, stumbling out into a night filled with drunken women and flustered men. he did everything for you until he couldn’t do anything more, her mother said, and wiped her husband’s brow while their daughter bit her bottom lip yet again. why do you mock me, he asked, and in the dark with the bedsheet covering only the bottom part of a slender thigh his lover replied, because you love me as no other, because no man would take this kind of abuse from another man and love me so fiercely. these are the lies we tell one another between the friction and the release, to get from friction to release. it is never happenstance, only a series of moves across, an accumulation of flesh wrung free from bone.