Two people are on a futon in a three-roomed single-bedded apartment. The ring of rock’n’roll is playing in the background. A candle is burning. In the kitchen, two empty thai food boxes are sitting on the counter. The refrigerator purrs. In the upper corner of the living room, he draws a heart because that corner looked lonely. Her hands are soft like dockleaves and dust, and she has tattoos to remember herself the way children do on trees. Her shelves shelter her favorite characters, stacked stones, and animals. Her thumb taps his leg to the beat of the King’s staccato guitar dance. She has a book on her lap, the second volume of a diary that she has penciled through. Her eyes laugh at the computer screen with him, at something they both understand, at foreign lands, tradition, and small gods. He kisses her head and tousles her short hair with his lips and she giggles silently.

When we love, we kiss ourselves often. We find our passion in someone’s muscle and skin, in the pages of spines, in the squinting of eyes, in quick-drawn breaths. It sucks into our lungs like boron, and we choke on it. We writhe in our stomachs to the uncomfortable comforts of recognition, and we feed dreams to our minds with embraces and the shared, creaking support beams of skeletons. Love is a circular action because it bends back on itself, and touches it tongue to its talented toes. It wears furs, rags, and lace, and refuses to be questioned. It is an apple with a forest in its core, and we bite it and toss the uneaten middle until the singular occasions where we remember the uneaten flesh and decide to take all of it in and leave only the seeds in our palms, waiting to be tossed into earth and die or grow up, up beyond the canopies of our hair and outstretched arms whilst we let the roots creep under our toenails and into our chests.