Of course there were others. Juvenile planets we fantasised, laid on our bare backs, dust streaming from our eyes—long before the train ride to meet each other again. To witness that trick of light along the river. The game we played of loving straightforwardly, past the silos, where smog equaled nostalgia and red skies triggered a girlhood alarm.

Past fishless reservoirs and heronless fog, years later—the keening of icecaps against our knees. A fugue that blues the ear, straining to hear the whale’s song—fainter now from starvation. Still, we follow the river, seeking what we had to leave—the dark lake with two lilies at its navel, the summer of grapefruit the size of volleyballs, we halved—worms crawling out like drunken guests.

Now, the knife just opens up two thick silences—white at the rind of its creased mouth. Who is holding out our halves to us these days? Is this why the river runs away? How I love you in reverse—before taxes and tallness, before towers, and bricks like loose teeth, raining on a parade. There’s a district now where the sky powders against the nape. A postmemory—the dear friend held in exile. The voice dredged of nectar, as butterflies loiter in a cold spell, confused between fall and the next life.

Are these instructions for an emergency?

Where to gather and crouch so the hawk-drone won’t mistake our pleasure for the animal kind—windwhipped on soft, bent limbs? It’s a game—you unname me, and we coax each other into the flow, which is sometimes a trick of old light that arrives because you are here, heaping sugar into your anxious brew, reading the news about another great flood. The waterline rising along the river that hasn’t yet vanished in your eyes. It is there, just harder now. A field of snow or lace in a fragile Pacific bowl, tilted towards my lap—and you, saying how it was always true and crystalline.

Never just a game of languid bodies, sinking into too-soft depths.