X, You Are Here, and Other Tales
Lauren’s here. She’s listening to music from a snow globe. It’s so beautiful I want to call and play it for you. It makes everyone tired. We sleep after, and after that we wake up singing the snow globe song. I get the verse wrong and mess up the melody. Everyone says that’s not how it goes and they play it for me again. The paramedics don’t come.
Someone with a coin looks for my slot, feeding it to my arm and then my throat, but it doesn’t work. We have been exactly our neighbors, knocking on our own doors as if we were other people. This must be me in this hotel room, telling myself. This must be it with curtains. This must be the decidedly pale lamp shade I put my arm under, petting the bulb.
This is like the time we looked at the sky until we could, with certainty, finish drawing it from memory. We’re at another map. It says X, YOU ARE HERE, but I have a feeling you’re not. I uncomplicate the math in this situation by taking away the X. YOU ARE HERE floats aimlessly. I saw you, and you were here and here, but now nothing is here but this map. I curse in my head. The trees stand like accent marks above the ground.