Remember when you used to call me Little? I don’t remember when it started but I remember when it stopped. Sometime after Eli’s visit, or maybe even further after that, when being in love with other people was such a better look on each of us. My hair was blue. I didn’t think much of it. I kept this note though, from when you were lazily doodling these cigarette-smoking Mickey Mouses at some dinner party I had, big bubble letters in an unsteady arc. You made a salad. Hi Kids. We colored it in together with blood. I put it on the mantle at my old apartment and was surprised at how long the blood stayed pink. It turned brown eventually and faded. I was definitely still recreationally cutting back then but I don’t think the blood was just mine, maybe it was yours too. You had a scab? I don’t know. I wanted you to bleed me but was afraid of how our flesh might turn.
Anyway, this note lives in a folder now. I take it out sometimes and flip it. Maybe it’s important to air memories before they fester, but it’s not like that between us, not now that we’ve learned to let the breeze in, fickle. Not stagnant, like how we think of ephemera, frozen in time. That Walter Russell diagram; titled “symbol of love extended from rest to motion.” No, I look away from it so it can surprise me, when the context shifts; note how it makes me jolt at each instance of emergence. When the cat drags it out with her teeth or it drifts easy in a spill of papers. The blood’s greener now. Was that stain always there? To keep moving someone is to move with them too, in time.
Dotted routes veering close but also apart. It’s what makes a pulse.
Trisha Low is a poet and performer. She is the author of two books—The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions, 2013) and Socialist Realism (Emily Books / Coffee House Press, 2019).
