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The rain is coming down. It pours like a pitcher of water on the roof, pouring, and pouring, and pouring. We are underwater. I am the goldfish in the rain barrel, here is my lichen-covered stick. I eat mosquito larvae to live.

This bed is a ship, a grassy plain, an inland tundra. It was built by two fags in the southeast in their dark-wooded, glossy apartment. They brought the two-by-sixes in, stick by stick, and fastened them together with tools and bits of metal until they had a thing more sturdy than anything that had ever existed, ever. The lived in it, did whatever it is that people do in their lives, looked out the high windows at the courtyard and the apartments on the other side, fancy people or people who smoked indoors, money and sadness. Then the crew fell apart, flew like starlings to all corners of the earth, and the apartment was emptied of things, and the ship had to be sawed short, legs cut off at the knee, just to get it out the door. They gave it to me, we carried it down three flights of stairs, me in my butch flannel and two small-hipped fags in keds, one of them on the front end, the other dancing around in his tiny pink sweater, lifting here, lifting there, on his tip-toes as if barely tethered to the earth. At the sidewalk we heaved it into the back of my housemate’s small yellow truck and grinned our last goodbyes. I drove home, pushing wind beneath the trees that rattled now, just a little, blew their leaves about like electric pink confetti, end-of-the-world orange. Were it not for photosynthesis, I think, what color would everything be?

These days, now, I am putting all in order, these days I am taking care. At this point I know that many things could get better- I know that I could get my gut back, I could get my sleep back, uninterrupted, and how wonderful would that be! I could have so many things! and so I cry, my gut an anvil, at the possibility of wanting something. At the possibility of wanting anything, ever, of acknowledging my existence on this planet, of accepting the fact that I am here and will continue to be here for any number of days, of new moons, of things too large and much too small, of mornings and middle-of-the-nights, of bucket-of-water endless rainy days like this one. I cry on the back deck and Macon finds me, does that thing that she does so well, that thing that people know how to do when they make a steadfast friend of sadness, a best friend of sadness, sadness as one’s own inland sea. As I cry I am grateful that sadness only comes to me in moments, like a hot fast burning, and burns up all the underbrush, the accumulated windfall, the small sticks like ladders up the bottom of the dry spruces, and is gone. Macon rubs my back and I can see into her soul and I think how hard this thing can be, how hope is like making a promise to the very earth you stand on, the deck where you sit, like making a promise to your lunch you tried to eat, but couldn’t, like saying Yes, Yes, Yes, to the slanted sun of afternoon, to the laundry tumbling in the dryer, it’s like saying everything out loud that you swore you’d never say, like gathering all the people in a huddled mass and promising them that the sun will rise tomorrow, waving your arms and promising to them that everything they ever wanted will come true, it’s like taking up a megaphone the size of Jupiter and declaring to the entire milky way that there is, all of a sudden, a thing other than this very moment, as if there has ever been anything other than this moment. Yes, hope is saying, I Will Try, I Will Try, I Will Try.