I am in Anna's room at night. We slowly go to bed. I finish my beer, put the bottle on their nightstand lit by crosshatched streetlights, kiss them, and look into their sleepy smile as they drift into dreams.

I stare at ourselves in the mirror across the room. I haven't eaten all day, and the blueness of the room lit by the LED clock in the corner makes me nauseous.

Through the sickness, a flood of memories encapsulates my soul; free at last. Anna fell asleep on me, their breath blows on my face.

Something happened tonight that really pulled me up.

At one moment Anna was coming, at the next they became Sam. How could this have happened? Is this what makes soldiers believe in God? This phenomenon has wings. Anna's face is morphing Sam to Jamie to Yasmin at my heart's pace.

After staring for minutes on end at this surreal montage, nausea creeps up on me again.

I can't put a finger on my sickness. Nothing, yet everything is connected, the torments of the mind are made real in my body. I try to sleep but beams of light are shooting across the darkness of thin flesh.

I feel as if I am back in my dorm room with Yasmin. Her brown skin is white with desire, forever whispering in my ear, “she would have had your smile, your smile.”

This thought resonates through my extremities yet I feel no emotion. Every detail of the dorm is now pulsating with brightness. The CDs, shivering trees, the reflection of my unwashed face when she leaves, all beam.

Time moves slowly, I think of war, of death. Shame is unshakable. My mind has bubbles as the water has and so much is pouring out from the top.

I'm in this finicky relationship with life. Undiscovered graves occupy my mind, buried deep with intoxication. Sometimes when my thoughts rain heaviest, corpses float to the surface.

Yet I denounce shame at all costs; that feeling is far too familiar to me to abet dread. I open my eyes and kiss Anna while she sleeps. The moon is white as a coffee cup, the stars sparse between plastic blinds.

In my head, I am now back in the basement of the house I grew up in, with Jamie. The room is black and red as snow is covering the small windows. I feel stubble on my hands, the softness of shoulders, a kiss, a voice asking me to tell a story. Instead I kiss their neck, a tattooed stomach. 

We awake in the morning, walk to a coffee shop and drink black coffee.

They tell me about their dreams as we sit in the wooden café:

“We were in what I'd imagine to be an Arabian market in the Middle East. We bought fresh mango juice and then you started being racist to everyone and making really horrid jokes very loudly.”

“Horribly racist?” I start to laugh.

“Yes. Really racist. I know this sounds absurd but it gets weirder. This guy comes along and picks you up over your shoulder and carries you off. He looked like an Imam or a Mufti, cloaked in religious clothing. You wouldn't stop laughing and saying horrid things as he carried you away. I found the whole thing in poor taste but I chased after you, through the marketplace, out to the edges of town where there was a purple mosque out in the middle of the desert. You had completely disappeared. I was looking for money then I realized you had my passport, so I started walking to the mosque.”

I sip my coffee and laugh. ”Only because I had your passport?”

They continue.

“When I get to the mosque, I realize it is an illusion. I started crying, and then, a sandstorm picked up and a wall of sand with a faint outline of your face buried me. I feel like I've been crying all night, like I have sand in my eyes.”

They finish their coffee and stare blankly for a while.

Fall is setting in and the mild winds blow multi-colored leaves through the city streets. We walk through back roads a while and come upon a lake near a field and a cemetery and walk the path.

“Have you been writing?” they ask.

I turn to look at them, hair golden in the sun, smiling behind a plaid scarf. I answer yes but avoid the matter. 

“I've been having bad insomnia lately; I haven't slept in days,” I say into the wind.

We walk. The gravestones in the cemetery are discolored, slanted and jagged; smiling like an old man's teeth. After a brief pause they ask: “Well, what have you been writing about?”

I look to the sky and prepare an answer within familiar reality.

“About what love means.” 

They respond quickly. ”And what does it mean ?”

I kiss them in the middle of their brow, look into their eyes, and turn away. I continue walking past the gravestones, stop to see if my eyes can make out the weathered dates and names.

“Was that all?” they ask.

I laugh and take out tobacco to begin to roll a cigarette. The wind blows shredded leaves sidelong into the lake where ducks quack. Mothers with strollers have now turned into joggers and the sun is setting.