by Peter Gabriel

I am always waking up with a semicolon planted in my chest. Don’t worry, I don’t know what that means either, but these days I’m finding love in everything: an unplugged nightlight, the whine from the broken garbage disposal, the bed we never make it to because the living room couch is 12.6 feet closer to the front door we are always crashing into. There’s a hurricane somewhere, a tsunami somewhere else. The Earth shakes, and then it shakes again. Still, I imagine waves and how we are that. I am synthetic in the most natural way. This morning I woke up to my heart going bang, bang, bang. I woke up and wondered, do monsters ever find themselves lost in a nightmare? And can you Google Maps yourself awake? This morning the dirt called. It wanted to give everything we buried back, but my pills in my medicine cabinet have been working and these walls haven’t bled in days, so I told the dirt to fuck off. All of my to-do lists start and end the same way: you in you in you. It’s easy to cry at dusk, as the sun slips behind the mountains, or as I drive by a sign on a highway that reads: THIS ROAD IS EMPTY WITHOUT YOU ON IT, as I stare at the sign above my bed, scribbled in red chalk I never bought: THESE SHEETS ARE DRY WITHOUT YOU IN IT, and every time I close my eyes and stare at the tattoo on the inside of my eyelids: I REGRET EVERY PICTURE OF US I NEVER TOOK.

 

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Peter Gabriel‘s writing has appeared in Maudlin House, Eunoia Review, and Arcturus. He can be reached at thingsiwrotebeforeidied@gmail.com.