How to write this country without writing chestnuts. Roasted and cracked, folded into paper cones. Our bodies slight and young and female, in a trot across ancient Turkish cobblestones.
Yesterday: the ferry to Asia, dark water choppy at the bow, sky a polluted haze. Today, by the Blue Mosque, you ask me how it feels to be a Pisces.
I know what you mean: how does it feel to be ill?
A brain in overdrive.
I take a lot of baths, I say. Something about water.
You’re a fish, you say.
We laugh, and you hum a song from our childhood. Something about a break, repeating. I’ve always taken it to mean the ocean.
Two years later, I will have my own break. I’ll be strapped to a hospital bed in California, flamed by florescence, muscles straining to get free, brain in incoherent loops.
But right now, you’re beside me on a bench humming. I can see the flutter of your breast beneath your shirt: heartbeat, breath. I reach for your hand and thread my fingers between yours.
How to write you without writing this country? Your body in a crowded market. Your lips, your long dark hair, the shape of you moving away from me.
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