Do not be scared.

I dreamt that a bristle from my toothbrush was trapped between my teeth. My failed attempts to extract it with the too-large tips of my fingers fishing around with dirty nails sufficed only to irritate my gums. My face was sore on the entirety of one side. I dreamt it, because I woke up and there was nothing in my mouth, and I was in no pain.

I do not want to be afraid, and I do not want to give in to fear.

There’s a very specific kind of waiting that feels like heartbreak. Waiting for specific people. That’s it. I can wait forever for the river to calm, but in a schoolyard in anticipation of my mother or the space between phone calls from a friend feels like a duration of time I can subtract from the end of my life. PSAs used to decry how each cigarette I smoked represented a margin of time I’d have to deduct from my life. How is it possible that when you share so much with a person, the marginal proportion that would make you whole could represent but a single bristle on a toothbrush, a splinter. And is that too much? It is all I have asked for. It is all I’ve ever wanted in this life that I insist on truncating with cigarettes. To narrow the odds. To show you my teeth.

I sit here at work and can’t stop worrying the space where this bristle should have been with my tongue and we stand before each other saying nothing. Silence is not always obscurity. Was it Occam, Heisenberg, a Russian I think anyway who said something about how naming things could not feel good; would not end well. Only a man would say that. I feel every part of my mouth fill with energy and it looks more like an inhalation than a swallow. I wish I had the courage to eat and breathe.

I do not want to be afraid but more than anything I want for you not to be afraid.

We think the universe is the place we happen upon. It is not. It is the room we have created for the truth. Whether this is the hand that touches me, or that I have written an entire fantasy about it.