Wednesday, April 20, 2022

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.
 


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