In Response to Feeling Alone by t. liem

In Response to Feeling Alone 

Doubtless our lives are solitary but also the inverse.

–Jenny Xie

 

Everything’s been known before us OK. The clouds

 

disappear the sky sometimes; or they become it. When we stood on Seminyak beach

like a pair of exclamation points,

 

we heard the same offing tone heard when someone went to look for their father’s

corpse in 1965, didn’t we. Please don’t make me explain this. After the fact

 

a siren seesaws by my open window. Passing on the street a voice in a phone

says no I’m alone now so it’s possible ghosts also vacation

 

from whats-to-come. How many people can you name who want to be loved without

enthusiastically loving back? The common

 

cause of disappearances costs us. We live in the aftermath. In other words, if one more person tells me the country of my father’s birth is cheap

 

I will lose it. In other words, this is the only language I speak. To my slightest

disappointment: I’m just writing to say hello. No need to write back.

 

Don’t get me wrong, waiting isn’t passive, but what if they never found him? Spoiler

alert you already know they didn’t; or they found him

 

a thousand times a thousand times. The story I was told was cooked on a soaking wet

 skewer piercing the meat of it through and through. In other words,

 

an implication. Not to change the subject, but if you think an apocalypse will eliminate

the wealth gap, let’s hold together the premonition

 

it will not. Admiration turned me into a housefly, repeating my body against a window

trying to get out. I lied

 

low about having let particular men touch me, but don’t leave me alone now before I

recover. Their spines turned in on the shelves reveal thick wads of time I spent in

omission. Gentle paper, I ask for it back. Doubtless

 

this moment is our opening.