SylviaVeir

Boy out of containment, you ran rampageous in my heart and altered it forever.

Flawed but perfect you were an unexpected friend when I was half a world from home and lonely, and I miss you like that half-forgotten dream that could-have-been. But Death chased me down chilly Teslin only to flush into the Bering Sea, circle down and wash ashore on the California coastline where I dipped my toes in the Pacific and thought of summer. I knew you for all of seven days: lost boy, with scars deeper than I could comprehend. You broke a piece off of my heart when you told me “Funny thing I know you more than my closest homie” I guess I never knew you at all.

I talked to you, face to face, for only seven hours, a connection established over a phone charger and a shared inclination towards insomnia. I roped you in with stories from my travels, my field of study, my country, while you caught me with your gentle ways and how you paid attention to the little things. The devil in the details: I saw your sad eyes, listened as you told me of your misfortunes - the aspirations you misplaced somewhere before you fell into a coma. But we joked and exchanged selfie for selfie; a novel concept I found strangely endearing. And we laughed, quietly, as blinding headlights gave way to the Califonia dawn. My des

Glacier-fed, you could have been my final destination an early grave waiting to swallow me up. I got caught in your rapids, your eddies, your current, like a cold electrocution that had me hyperventilating: asphyxiating on nothing but air. But I fought the Reaper in your waters, scratched and clawed for blood, for purchase, grasping for dear life with fingers stiff and cold from premature rigor mortis. And as hypothermia chased me downstream: a piranha or a shark smelling blood, you taught me a lesson in self-preservation, and the mindless struggle to survive.

I am stronger than I look; a hard truth disguised beneath soft flesh and brittle bones. I suffer from an alcoholic father; an illness for which there is no easy cure. But it has poured steel into the makeup of my molecules, sculpting a survivor from soft clay and wax the colour of fear. It has taught me that I cannot be defeated, not by anything but myself. I inherited my backbone from my mother: a pliable, rubbery thing that will bend and sway but never break, never cave in on itself like something fragile. I will rise, and rise again, like a phoenix from the ashes, like a forest after the fire. And I will never stay down for long.

Time heals, they say, but you have taught me: there is no remedial power in seconds ticking by; day after day until a year has passed and i, well, i can no longer count the hours since you left. your smile lingers like an afterimage on the inside of my eyelids, laughter that comes in a flash of teeth, without sound, and i conjecture; sparkling eyes and golden hair, but i cannot see you. you are gone. it is a slow descent into nothing, a gradual fade that makes me speculate what else i have lost along the way. i wonder how long can i keep your smile?

i. i suffer from myopia; a side effect of university and genetic predisposition that has been irritated into existence by my association with the written word ii. it is a prerequisite almost for my chosen profession, the least of my ailments, easily cured behind curved glass or concave plastic. it has taught me nothing except how to change the colour of my irises iii. because i always knew that sight is relative, and the art of seeing is substantially underestimated by those, who can.

She has spent her nights crawling the walls of her bedroom, tossing and turning in dark hours crowded with loneliness and unfulfilled desires: lost beneath a moonless ceiling while orion plays hide-and-seek with the curve of the earth. she knows the sound of the paper boy slamming the front door and feeding hungry letter boxes their daily diet of vellum and ink; lies that rattle cold and metallic at 4 a.m. draco, draco, she whispers to the shadows as cats bluster battle cries beneath her window. or is it the irascible offspring of her next door neighbours? or the wind, perhaps, filling out these hollow spaces september has left beneath the