As we followed the footpath into the towering grove, I told him I’d slept there once though I’d use the word sleep lightly.

Much like the bamboo, arms and limbs and torsos swaddled in spirals like unpredictable breezes.

Shifting light broke the silence of shadows from between the curtain of leaves over restless bodies. In the absence of a home in familiar arms, rest is elusive.

Instead we listen for signs of life. Predator? I think not; pray, tell me something honest. It’s always the disfiguring of love. But can’t you see the trees? Narrow, bent, felled or broken, they keep growing because it’s written into them. The same tap lines and roots live within us too.

I tried counting and breathing and doing all the things I do when I’m alone, but nothing succeeded in making me forget where I was, and wasn’t.

I thought about leaving every hour but was arrested by warmth and the possibility of what could happen within each successive moment. Hunger never truly sleeps.

She’s quiet for a while but the stirring rattles overhead and under sheets of shed skin and seasons of fallen leaves, composting hope.

Resisting futility we looked up to the sun who reminded us, tomorrow is not as forsaken as we feared.

Leaning into each other, they swayed; a rocking kind of lullaby where at their feet we sigh and weep.

So anyway, like I said, I love you. ~

Fell; Verb ‘using an ax to fell a tree’

To descend freely by the force of gravity