void alpha
I took you past the southern gate where the roads forget their names, through districts of reflected dust and windows without flames. You said the night had been arranged by someone kind and blind; I said the stars were not above but something left behind. I denied it for a while, the geometry of loss, the quiet proof that every door is also still a cross. Some loves are drawn before we live, some maps are made of rain; I walked the same deserted street and never walked again. There once was a man who dreamed a planet and woke inside the dream; he kept a coin, a broken watch, a book no one had seen. Please don’t call him fallen, he never climbed that high; he only found a mirror and mistook it for the sky. Finally found a sentence, finally lost the page, finally met his double at the far end of his age. Mostly found a doorway standing open now. And I denied it for a while, the arithmetic of pain, that one can leave a universe and find it there again. Some wounds are not remembered; som...