7:25

I sat with my friend while they spoke about themselves and their soul, high on the edge of the road, listening to the traffic below us and the animals around us, my fingers tapping against the sidewalk because my legs were hanging sixty feet above the ground and I am terrified of heights, but I tried to listen with the early September night wind in my skin and ears. 

They asked me what I had dreamed and I told them about the burning trees and old apartments where I walked inside my bedroom to find it covered in grass and moss, mice moving through my mattress.

I asked them about nighttime-thoughts and they only told me about their broken heart.

"Why do you write of horror?" they asked.

"Why are your eyes blue?" I replied.

"I feel heavy metal around my neck," they said. "I am trying to crack it from my body, but my flesh-fingers are not strong enough. I have to learn alchemy to melt the silver and gold."

"I do not see my mind as an organ," I said. "It is electric, dark water, full of sea plants and amphibians; if you cup your palms and drink, you see visions from the mold growing off of the feathers of drowned angels."

"Why do you write of horror?" they asked.

"Because I have too much love," I replied.

"Love is not horror!"

"Then your heart has barely been broken."

I tried to tell them that even when the leaves were becoming ash in my dreams that a young boy helped me save the branches. I gave them memories of Los Angeles, standing in an old black coat beneath of neon sign, alone and my skin cracked like fins from the January ocean and watching the blinking green-glow and laughing to no one, because there was no one to laugh to but myself and god and friends on a different coast of the continent. I told them how I sat on the roof of my car and drank gin from a bottle and stole food for a homeless dog that rested beside me that night, watching the sun roll up the Pacific.

"Why do you write of horror?"

"To break free of slavery you have to disgust your masters."

"That is not an answer."

"I want to be able to truly kiss my lover."

I kept my back to the ground after they left, letting the insects crawl into my clothes to be next to the songs of Solomon that have survived thousands of years, in my blood and in theirs, the words of ancient people falling asleep together in silence, listening to the mechanical rhythm of the cars below.