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"escapril" day 1: dawn

"and like the dawn you woke the world inside of me" - the oh hellos, 'like the dawn'

"they say we are asleep until we fall in love" - the great comet, 'dust and ashes'

first time i saw you, really saw you, was in the morning,

sun in my eyes, december in my lungs, your arm over my chest

and then you, sitting up, sun in your hair and sleep in your eyes and light,

light, light, all around you,

rays all tangled up around your face and arms

like someone bottled up the sun and bathed you in it

and you didn't look at me, then, not really,

left quickly, left quietly, and how could i blame you, really, after everything,

but still, watching you leave, sunrise chasing you, sunlight clinging to your every move,

still, my friend,

i think i have spent my whole life in the darkness and

looking at you then, really looking at you, for the first time,

was like waking up.

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“escapril” day 3: is anyone listening?

"I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. Huh. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells." - Welcome to Night Vale

"but how else can i hope to explain myself here? and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself i must, else all these chapters might be naught" - Moby Dick, the Whiteness of the Whale

you have heard this story before, my friends,

i'm sure,

but lean close, listen anyway.

it may do you some good.

i am not telling this story for you, my friend,

but listen close, hear me anyway.

it is burning me out from the inside,

eating me alive,

and so this may do me some good.

i don't know how to tell you why i am telling you --

don't know how to say that no,

it was never "inspiration" that made me tell this story, but

something more like hunger,

something more like greed,

something more like survival. so

let me tell you this story, night after night,

let me tell you this story, a thousand and one times,

like it is the only thing keeping me alive

because maybe it is.

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"escapril" day 5: the view from up here

"the bright side of the planet moves toward darkness/and the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,/and for me, now as then, it is too much./there is too much world." -czeslaw milosz

"you once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation." -'on earth we're briefly gorgeous,' ocean vuong

watch that ringed horizon expand around you helplessly

and tell me you don't find something terrifying to

all that endless. all that blue.

(but it's beautiful, isn't it? )

i don't think i was made for this. my world was once

the size of a sailboat. the size of a promise.

no space for hollow weighing on us.

(there's a certain elegance to emptiness.)

my world is the size of tides and vacancy.

it hurts to look at. all that unbroken infinity isn't big enough

or narrow enough to hold what i have become.

(there is so much. enough to drown in. not enough to swim.)

i once found it enchanting. those shoreless watery pastures,

boundless and brilliant. i suppose i still do.

all that endless. all that blue.

(my god, it's all around.)

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"escapril" day 6: obsession

"i have hated the words and i have loved them, and i hope i have made them right" - the book thief, markus zusak

i once knew a man with lightning in his eyes and curses in his hands.

to speak of him is to speak only of war

of a world beyond our making and our reckoning

of a story twisted beyond imagining

and it is terrifying -- i am terrified --

of what it has to tell me.

i keep coming back to it.

you would have spent the rest of your life chasing that whale.

we vowed your vow. all our oaths were as binding as yours.

so here i am.

making sense of it. terrified of what it has to show me

of picking apart your story only to find pieces of mine

terrified of finding something akin to myself

in your broken endings and tangled lines.

but i keep coming back to it.

if i could only --

i did not tell it right the first time. let me try again,

and again. let me try to understand what happened

in the only way i know how. again. let me get it right.

if i could only --

i will spend the rest of my life chasing this tale.

to speak of it all is to speak only of war.

i stumbled and fought and failed through his binding, blinding oath

his frenzied chase

clambered out the other side but still

it clings to my heels.

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"escapril" day 8: hometown

"and i keep you safe from harm/you hold me in your arms,/and i want to go home/but i am home" -riches and wonders, the mountain goats

for the first time in a long time, someone asks me where i am from.

he means it sincerely, i think. he means well.

i don't know how to tell him home is something i can no longer put words to

that it is the image on the back of my eyelids

a constellation missing a star

i don't have the words to tell him that home is a language i am slowly forgetting

that my memory is a stone the ocean beats against

that my body is a riddle my heart beats against

so i do not tell him that. ( not yet).

instead i tell him the story i tell myself: of a home that i remember,

of a language that's still mine.

again, and again, he asks me of home.

aloft or below, night or day, stumbling against me or sober,

he will ask,

never pushing, never forceful,

just curious. and caring.

i don't know how to tell him home looks different now

like whispered stories and yellow hair

like a passed pipe and a circle of friends

each their own point in this strange new constellation and

i don't have the words to tell him that

when he looks at me and laughs ( and all the stars are in his eyes)

it is in a language i understand.

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“escapril” day 10: parasitic

"his absence was a looming presence. the lack of him filled me with him.” -china miéville, railsea

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it...that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing... recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?" - moby dick, 'the symphony'

this is what happens when you drown a man in violence.

put a man on a boat and give him a compass and he learns to sail.

put a man on a boat and give him a lance and he learns to kill.

give him both and eventually he drowns.

judge me if you will. cast your stone. i will not excuse myself here,

only explain.

this is a story of anguish and anger. this is a story

of greed and hunger. it is an old story. it is my story. perhaps yours.

here, then, are the players:

here is a man who has spent his whole life in violence. but he is

already known.

here is a shipowner of ire and ignorance. he knows the man is hurt

and sends him out anyways.

here is a child of callousy and carelessness. they left him to die

and he had nowhere else to turn.

here is whiteness. here is that pasteboard mask. here are those cowardly gods

here is their fury and their injustice. here is their blasphemy and their

impiety. here is that inscrutable malice. here is whiteness. here is

how it takes and suffocates, how it smothers and suffers, how it extracts

and exploits. gnaws at us all from the inside. here is violence. here is whiteness.

and here is the whale.

judge me if you will. god knows i deserve it. but

i am what happens when you drown a man in violence.

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“escapril” day 14: pink, like your brain

"the ivory pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. you would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods." -moby dick, 'cutting in'

slice it open, will you?

cut right down to the fucking bone.

watch your hands --

and your step and your neck

mind the fingers, greenie, steadier hands than yours

have sliced appendages clean off.

sure, it's like skinning an orange, if you're particularly romantic.

peeling back layers of blood and pink skin and thick, squishy fat in a sickening spiral,

raising it higher and higher like a fucking sacrifice to the sun,

that heavy mass of tissue and gore dripping blood all 'round your fucking feet

and swaying overhead in the wind like the rancid hand of judgment

always inches from boxing your ears and knocking you right off the ship

could be likened to the rind of a dying fruit, if you wanna be poetic about it.

you could call slicing its head off a funeral

and its rotten muscly corpse a ghost

and falling into its brain like drowning in honey

and maybe you can find somethin' a little too tragic about this

macabre fucking cooking show, somethin' a little too familiar

about the stench of flesh we burn and the color of brains we kill

if you think too hard but

this ain't a job for a poet, greenie.

we'll slice and burn and boil the poet and the oil

right out of you both, with enough time.

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“escapril” day 15: euphoria

"it gets all right/to dream at night/believe in solid skies and slate blue earth below/but when you see him/you'll know" ... "and you'll breathe easier just knowing that the worst is all behind you, and the waves that tossed the raft all night have set you on dry land" - the mountain goats, 'never quite free'

the corner of his mouth twitching up,

briefly, like a heartbeat.

his heartbeat, beneath my head on his chest,

warm and fluttering, like a smile.

i thought i'd lost him, once. thought i'd never

feel that steady thrum, like seabirds' wingbeats, like

cyclic sea waves, again. thought i was lost, again,

more lost after having once been found and left

aching for that smile, that warmth, that touch but

he found me, again.

i think i will always find him again.

morning falls like rain on us and

rims his face in a halo of sunrise.

his mouth twitches up,

briefly, like a dream.

i won't wake him yet, but

curl back up against him instead. dream

like his smile. safe and soft.

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"escapril" day 18: how did the sky look?

"first the colors. then the humans. that's usually how i see things. or at least, how i try." - the book thief, markus zusak

i don't remember what the color of the sky was when i lost you.

i remember the night before was inky blue dripping

all over your face, your hands, your question-mark spine,

i remember the day before was liquid fire melting

all around our ship, turning the sea to a gilded forge but

i don't remember the sky the last time i saw your face.

knocked from the boat. flung astern. lost in waves the color of--

i don't know.

i remember meeting you under winter grey the color of frost on windowpanes

and i remember falling in love with you under every blue, yellow, and white

that old ocean's ever seen. i remember kissing you next to sunsets

the color of heartbeats and through storms the shade of wildness and

mornings like spilled honey and

i remember you telling me the kaleidoscope of

every color you'd fallen in love with and every sky

you thought you'd drown in

and i remember seeing, for the first time in my life,

all the wondrous hues you put names to.

i don't have a name for the color of the sky when i lost you.

something the color of heartbreak. something the color of mistake.

something the color of a wave breaking

under its own weight.

something the color of.

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“escapril” day 19: tough to be a bug

"..the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. the intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my god!" moby dick, 'the castaway'

i think you'd like to be

a lot bigger than you are right now,

wouldn't you, kid?

think you wished you were the size of a

buffalo. or a ship. or a whale.

but you aren't, boy,

you aren't, and we can't afford

to lose whales by the likes of you.

jump again and we won't pick you up but

don't worry, boy,

you're small enough to fit in the hands of gods.

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"escapril" day 21: hands, wrists, teeth

“do all lovers feel they're inventing something?” - portrait of a lady on fire

oh, what will be left of us, i wonder?

when we've outgrown our bones and beliefs and

our skin's too small for our skeletons and

what will be left of us when i can't feel

your heart in the veins of your wrist anymore? when

all this is over?

love, it is three in the morning .

right. sorry.

keep going.

go on.

i mean-- i don't know. what happens when we--

when this ends.

(a shift, a stir, a shuffling. an arm reaching out and a heartbeat

like a lifeline and a flash of a soft smile.)

what is this really about?

oh, i don't know.

we both know what's coming.

we do.

not what's after.

that's true.

so what then?

what about what's here?

not coming. not after. here already. here now.

three in the morning. hands and heartbeats and

bones and breath and mouths and hands. yours and mine.

here.

(a chuckle, a fluttering breath like wings and

a flash of laughing eyes)

that's not really an answer.

isn't it?

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"escapril" day 24: black hole

"my soul is more than matched, she's overmanned, and by a madman!" - moby dick, 'dusk'

so, this is where the light dies.

this is where you bring us, pull us,

task us. captain, oh captain, is this

what you planned for? did you

know your darkness had weight, had

magnitude and magnetic

force, drawing us in, did you know darkness is

not light's opposite but its

confessor?

captain, did you know this would happen?

know you'd burn so bright that you'd collapse all that light

into yourself, know you'd implode

into your own body, know it would destroy

all of you, all of us

with it? does a star know its own collapse?

know the prison its life implies?

in your first burst of brilliance. in your first

grasp at the heavens. could you have known that stars

live and die this way?

we knew. i knew. i let your gravity pull

on me anyway. invisible lines, invisible fabric,

tying me. weaving me. to you.

we'll spin closer and closer round this sunken black pit till it

drags us all down with it till we

have no choice but to confess our wholes to it till we

pledge ourselves parts of your perishing star.

captain, my captain.

if you had known. if you had known,

would you still have burned?

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"escapril" day 27: fight or flight

"away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home!" - moby dick, 'the symphony'

god, i'd take you to the edge of the universe if i could

and further, god, i'd grab you and run far away

with everything, away with his unfettered chase

and their unfaithful complicity and our unflinching fate and our god,

love, we don't have to play his game, we don't have to fight his monster, his

god, love, come away with me, i came out here to get away from

it all but "it all" also has a way of getting away from itself so now it's here too

much more of this and i think i'm going to lose you

and i don't think i can. god, i'll take you anywhere

as long as it's away from here, god, please, let us be away

from here, please let there be a way

from this, god, i'd take you there if i could.

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"escapril" day 30: dusk

"yet there is hope. time and tide flow wide." - moby dick, 'dusk'

"then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago." -moby dick, 'the chase--third day'

here, then.

in waning light let us take

a last, posthumous journey, before

this old world rolls herself over again.

the last time i saw you, really saw you,

was at nightfall. the sun went down with the ship

and you, buried in it.

brave and brilliant.

i wanted to tell this story without having to be

in it. i wanted to show you what happened without

having to live in it.

i don't have a name for the color of the sky

when i lost you.

something the color of

collapse.

there's something terrifying to

all that endless. all that blue.

boundless and brilliant.

let us end, then, where we began. with an orphan,

a stranger, a wanderer. left to suffer, left to die

miraculously saved.

an unfinished suffocation. an error

in divine bookkeeping.

an orphan who keeps coming back to this graveyard.

trying to understand it.

here, then.

in fading light you, rising with great force,

take your last, posthumous journey with me

as the sea between us rises

and rolls.

and all collapses. all collapsed.