Hey, you:

Roll your eyes over these words, tonight. (It must be night-time.)

There is a boy, or perhaps a man, sleeping on my couch. He is welcome to stay there for a year or more. I’d like for that to happen.

There are bugs gunning for my eyes. I don’t blame them so much for doing this. Maybe it’s their nature — the nature of little bugs, that is — to want to live inside one’s eyes. I don’t blame them for trying to fit inside of there. Maybe our eyes are puddles of strange water, to them. There are so many of them, though. I try not to kill them. I swat. They keep trying, though, God bless ‘em.

There is mud on my shoes.

I went underwater, today. Looked around, saw some things. Tried to breathe, couldn’t. Stepped on the bottom of the riverbed, and got mud all over my shoes. I’ll wash them off when I put my book down, or when I’ve run out of sunshine to capture. I have a lot of sunshine to keep with me, these days. Hangs around in the sky, floods the grass; sun-blasted and dry as a bone, it sure is. It doesn’t get dark until I’m ready for it to get dark. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship I have with the sun and the sky and the things that pass through it. I pass through it.

Though, you know, I’ve forgotten what it is exactly I’m doing that is beneficial to anything or anyone.

Anyway, so I went underwater, today. I was above it at times, too.

It was a hushed place. Everything kept going without the push of a button, and listen: I felt like an intruder. I did my best not to place sticks where they hadn’t been before, and I leapt from rock to bigger rock with only the nimblest of hops. When a handful of stones cascaded into the current and pulled them along some place far, I swallowed a tiny parcel of guilt and kept my hands about me, not wanting to disturb the things I hadn’t created that lived on without my touch.

When the forest allowed me to, I swung from long vines of mysterious origin, and allowed the cool creek water to swallow my dusty hands when I was afforded the opportunity. There would be stones shaped like human furniture, and if the forest invited me to do so, I’d sit on them with my human body. When I was asked not to, I didn’t. I nodded and understood. The forest purred and stretched and ached and yawned. I fell into the throat of it all and sunk. I was not at all afraid.

The forest would roar, and I would whimper softly. When it chose to be silent, I would tread gently.

The boy — man — that sleeps on my couch, he would walk with me. He’d say some things, and I’d listen. I’d say some things, too. We shooed away the insects that were fascinated with our eyes. When we held on to the vines and swung about, we’d forget about those bugs, and we’d forget about that date on our drivers’ licenses, and the rooms in our homes that were not at all like this place here.

Sometimes mud would find its way to the bottoms of our shoes, but of course we didn’t get mad at the forces that had created that mud. We’d just clean it off later.

“Let’s go underwater.”

There were tiny brown fish and tadpoles. Their entire world lay before us: a small inlet of clear water on the path of a larger body of more clear water. Stones had fallen to the floor of the tiny sea, either willed by the forest or the lazy calibrations of intrusive human beings. We knew we were intruding; we apologized. The forest sneezed and said it didn’t mind so much, as long as we put everything back where we found it, and cleaned up after every mess. “And leave the fish alone!”

We walked on, and on, and through the green and the familiar and were greeted by trees we’d never met before. “Hello!” We waved to them, and walked on, and on, and up and up, resting at the knees of a young mountain, hushed with our words, well in our hearts, and happy to be where it was both warm and shaded from the red giant that becomes a black one, and vanishes, and so do we.