We sat in the shape of a bird feeder and I was practically asleep in the sushi restaurant he chose. This is our fifth date, and I know too much about him already. Do you ever think of this? He asks me, and I don’t say I think only of these things. His energy is somehow still bouncing, even though we are sitting down. Had we just come from the beach? Was he running ahead of me when he chose to eat here? I was trying to describe him earlier and I wrote: stack of coasters, push-pop, ad-libbed centerpiece, pogo stick. He’s waiting for an answer, but I don’t give him one. I swallow my thoughts, attempting to cleanse my palette to see him with unbiased eyes. I keep having to do this, and whenever I am succesful and get to see him as if for the first time, I can’t help but laugh. He thinks I’m fliritng. I am.

We look at the plants that sprout between floor and wall like frozen water from burst pipes. Floor-a sweeps and fauna swoons.

I’ve looked down at my shoes to try and see myself with the same tabla rasa allowance I’ve been stoking during our conversation. My feet: Beat Up Kicks His feet: black shoes or brown shoes that say nothing about him. Black is the absorption of light. I am built of porous things, I am drawn from the rebel song. Brown is the color of I built and he built. I am stained like Rorschach and dream of weathered sea glass, but I believe in the soiled, spotless truth. I’m on a date with a proper noun. What would my mom think of the way he pronounces the words oven, wristwatch, overpass…

He orders his coffee black and his milk steamed, easier than ordering a kiddacino. I want to tell him I fell asleep in my mom’s lap at restaurants. The compulsion to take pictures out of dusty, handled scrapbooks puts me off; I do wish sometimes that books would stay closed.

Some unnumbered pages come unbound, and the fleet of understanding is defeated by do we know how median rare this is?

Light.

He notices it first.

Why?

He wears black blank pages. This, I understand.

I prefer to absorb and then emit light. Let it leave me; Like rainbow, I am built of porous things, I am drawn from the rebel song. I am ephemeral, what on earth is he made of? I’ll ask the carpenter that made him. Nathaniel is not built by the wizard or the algorithm, he is made of hands and a spine like a stack of souvenir coasters and a head like a black cotton dinner napkin arranged into a rabbit. The boy is undisturbed I must perturb I must perturb. Yes, alright, I do break, I do suntan in the wattage of his smile, I do sometimes dream of referring to and being regarded by his weathered sea glass eyes.
A portrait of a man interested and or in need of a firework. He reads my book and doesn’t look up when I shift forwards and backwards in my seat, careening on the edge of exhaustion and a little bit of fear, a little bit of— it’s not lust. Desire doesn’t account for it either.

It’s as if the fairy inside of me is politely taking notes on everything he does. She is named respectfully curious, and when she doesn’t know what to label something, she finds her way into my marrow and makes elbows out of arms. I look at her and we say triangles are the strongest shape. We laugh. I read her notes.

The flower decor on the walls around us is blue and pink and we dine on things that used to swim. The words I say are seed for extrapolation. Maybe in a few too many years, something will dawn and tire and slip in him; erosion and the blunt force of a misplaced cup on the edge of a counter will be enough to rumble the man that breathes and prays as if he were a heavy glass tumbler. Maybe not. Am I eroding? I look at him, excited to know nothing, or to feel like I know nothing.

He thinks, and he’s already assembling, the presentation whirs and I am privy; I get to watch him drink his lemonade today.