MOONLIGHT

Girl,
I want to lick the moonlight off your skin.

I want to laugh with you
Like those nights we felt we might be geniuses,
Even if other people didn’t get to see it,
Right there,
Tucked between our smile lines
And that half box of cabernet,
We left a breadcrumb trail of cigarette butts,
That way,
No matter how far we rambled out,
We could always find our way home.

I want to dream in the catacombs of your mind,
Filter out all the doubt,
All the monsters,
And make a nest out of all the times
You believed in yourself enough to say things like
Arena shows
And New York Times Bestsellers
And motherhood
And Jupiter.

I want to make creatures tuck their ears in shame
At just how primal we can be.
You and me,
Buried twelve feet deep in a tidal wave of
Lemonade and cd’s,
Burning black
The red tissue labels in our lungs,
That have carried us so long without blinking to breathe.
Let’s balance the friction with laughter,
Let’s make the rumble of the ocean seem tame,
Under the warm bath of purple lava lamps,
Like when we wrestle with sheets
Just to push,
To pull them free,
How we put Zen in our rhythm,
I want to be an animal with you, girl.

You sparkle of sunshine dust.
You purple hoodie, midnight, hallmark movie marathon,
Wrap me in the moonlight you so easily create.

You’re the first reason I’ve ever had
To look at myself with kindness.

Why so stressed, little heart?
Don’t let that melancholy mantra take you.
Cause I want to bathe in the way you experience life.
I want to melt against the flush in your cheeks.

I want to sit with you on our plaid couch
And drink Fufu Berry Jones Soda
And destroy a giant container of fried okra
And plan our trip through space.

I want to press the tip of my finger to your nose,
Like when you smile
With your tongue wedged between your teeth
To stop yourself from crying.

I want to lift my arms to shade you
From the tornadoes,
Under the yellow, recording mattress in our bathroom,
With our yappy little dogs,
As you write a makeshift will,
So the people we love can take us with them.
You refuse to leave any part of us unclaimed.

I want to smell the way you
Think about six hundred and twenty-five thousand things,
All at the same time,
And how you build levees that don’t break,
How you somehow always stop that flood to listen.

I want to take a thousand minutes,
Years,
The rest of my life,
To thank you for fixing me,
For turning off the piano
Every time I leave it idle,
For letting me check every lock in the house,
In a loop so redundant,
I don’t know how you fucking stand it,
For my smile,
For my smile,
For the smile that you purchased
With a semi-truckload of credit card debt,
And all the times you pushed a diamond
Right up into my soft spots to make them shine.

Girl,
You marionette of soul,
You writer of bad puns,
You singer of delicate intensity.
I can’t count the times I’ve trembled at the way
Your heart can’t help but break
Every time the melody kisses your tongue.

Send me a funny meme
About the kind of dad you think I’ll be.
Tell me that you think I’m brilliant,
Because it’s the only time I believe that I’m brilliant.
Show me how easy it is to navigate this madness.

That’s why I learned to pluck six strings
When all I ever knew was beating eighth note symphonies
Into worn out skin.

Why I etched a sea turtle into my forearm.
It’s so I could remember that life don’t come easy,
But when it does,
When life comes,
When it bursts into the hallway of corridors
That is my mis-wired, stutter mix of brain wave circuitry,
It is indescribably beautiful.
It is divine intervention.
It is finally being forgiven
For all the things I ever did
That made me hate myself.
It is holding another human being
I can’t help but want to hold
And feeling their heart beat against my ribcage
As we dance in moonlit skies.

It is you.

Sometimes,
I try too hard to get people to like me.
Sometimes,
I’m a prisoner to the manbun
And the demons that live beneath it.
Sometimes,
I trip over good intentions
Just to land in the muddy water
I was raised in.

Life
Is learning that every story can come true.

It is licking the moonlight off your skin
While you paint vivid pictures
Of intricate socio-political ideologies,
And passive income streams,
And ICF construction,
And what it means to be afraid
That no one will know your name.

How you always ask if I’m interested
In what you have to tell me,
And my answer is always

Yes.

It is wrapping our skulls in tin foil
And watching conspiracy docs
Until we place band-aids on our laptop cameras
And speak in whispers.

It is the way you eat popcorn,
Like a crazy person.

And how you talk to yourself
When no one’s in the room.
How you tell yourself,
On those special days,
On those days that don’t
Come nearly as often as you deserve,
How you tell yourself
That you can be anything.

It’s you.
Radical Rach.

Tell me your dreams.

I want to make them come true.