“I apologized often. That’s the thing with writer-types, you’ll have to apologize often. They know what they’re doing. They think of things and they write things, carefully, thoughtfully, meticulously, mindfully. You knew you were the one out of line soon enough.”

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short story, aug 23

  Did you ever date a poet? They’ll say things like “Everywhere I begin, I start again.” My poet was 24 years old with a round jawbone. She wrote me songs. She called them poems, but I told her they were songs. She ghosted me once for one week.


She ghosted me often. I would realize during those weeks that it was the sentiment that mattered. She wrote me a poem. About me. So what if the words rhymed too well? I apologized.


I apologized often. That’s the thing with writer-types, you’ll have to apologize often. They know what they’re doing. They think of things and they write things, carefully, thoughtfully, meticulously, mindfully. You knew you were the one out of line soon enough.


My poet wrote, too. Fiction or nonfiction or I don’t know. She called them “sketches,” though she’d never draw. My poet had short wavy hair—they were straight and then they curled. She looked exactly like someone who draws, and I told her she should draw. She said she couldn’t. That the most she ever learned to draw was Spider-man. I thought all the doodles she left in notes for me were yin-yangs.


My poet never showed me her “sketches.” She said she was “in outer space” in them. She said she was in orbit around me, but in her writing she was sometimes on the moon, sometimes in the moon. Sometimes she spoke with martians who were also on the moon, and they’d sit and talk and she’d want to stay with them.


For my 25th birthday wish, I asked to see her most favorite sketch. She told me “Don’t ever bite your own tail again.”


My poet wrote all her poetry on her phone. She wrote the sketches on them, too.


One time when she was asleep I took her phone and went to the hotel lobby and read one. It was dated two years ago and in a folder titled “sketches.” It was a nice, long write-up about how it felt to be in love with me, and came with a bullet point list of the different parts of the city we could get married in. I snuck back into the room and she was still asleep.


Another day I couldn’t help it, I blurted it out. I asked her how come she never expresses anything but writes poems and these sketches for me.


My poet told me the sketch was fake. That she’d written it just in case I went through her things. She said she wrote it in a better time, when it would’ve been cute, but now it wasn’t.




This wasn’t the last time I tried to see her sketches. I went through her laptop next month when she snuck out one morning and I stayed in bed. I knew she kept everything backed up, and I found it in her Dropbox. It was one small text file in a folder titled “work.” My poet thought I was stupid sometimes.


This time I found the real thing. It was password protected, but I guessed right. It was “moon-baby.” That’s all her passwords.


I opened her sketch and it was just one line. It was an address.


HOUSE #7-10, SOUTH SQUARE LOT, ROAD #98


I didn’t know where this was, but I went. The very next night, and it was just like a night. Just quiet. Just empty. Not a soul.


I Ubered to Road 98, dropped off just at the top. I hadn’t been here before. A narrow street but it stretched out, prolonging itself across at least seven streetlights. But they weren’t large streetlights themselves.    Small, just little things, standing on nothing.    Little spotlights on a vacant black night. No one lived here.


There were houses here    narrow from one side    long from another. A few houses. Rows. All warehouses. Padlocks on them, some with chains. As I passed, I saw some were opened, but they weren’t HOUSE #7-10.


I checked my phone, opened the map. Ran my fingers through the screen. I was just about. It was here somewhere. Ahead, the lights grew brighter and the grass grew more under my feet. I kept walking, wading almost. I saw fewer locks, signs of life.


My phone was on silent, and I had 12 missed calls. It was 1:23 AM. My poet would’ve liked that. The rarity of it. My poet gave me 11 missed calls, the other was from an unknown number. I texted my poet. I told her I was okay.


She replied a few minutes later.    Where are ou.


I texted back. HOUSE #7-10, SOUTH SQUARE LOT, ROAD #98.


She replied in seconds.    Wait for me.



I didn’t.



My trail stopped where the pin did. I saw bushes before anything—the grass grew up to bushes here. Patches, thighs-length. I made my way through them. A house on one side, said HOUSE #5-6. I moved through the bushes, to the other side. A house was there, longer than the others, but it was so far out of the way. I had to wipe the dirt off a sign on the ground just to make sure. HOUSE #7-10.


The warehouse’s gates were at the rear unlike the others, and the spotlights didn’t fall here. I felt around with my hands. No lock.


I pushed the gates. It was open. It parted down the middle. Is this the poetry my poet writes?


The gates parted, stopping eventually with a creak. I fitted myself through the slit. There was vague light inside, a refraction. I walked in and in. Waiting for my eyes to adjust, and they did. I saw it.


When they adjusted, I couldn’t see anything else.


The entire space of the warehouse was taken up by a long, long, long, long, tall, tall, tall tall metal constructed thing. All of it.


Green and large and cylindrical. It was a type of vessel, a ship. With bolts and compartments all about it. The vessel was laid horizontally. It was meant to go up.


I turned my face up to the top and I noticed just then that the warehouse had no ceiling. That blank blackness stood at the top, little hints of stars behind clouds. A slow night. A slow night. A slow night.


The warm metal surface scraped my chest and stomach as I angled through the narrow walking space. Which end was the way in?



There were more missed calls and texts now. I found an opening. A door unlatched. I went in. It was dark, but I made things out. There was one seat, bolted to the ground, and a dashboard. Switches, controls, keys. Coordinates. A lever. The closer I got the more I could see. I relied less on my hands.


I sat down at the seat. A long leather belt hung off the sides. I picked the two ends up and clasped them across my body.


I then took hold of the lever and pushed it down. I think. This part I don’t remember so well. I must have pushed it right then because the memories stop there. I remember whiteness. An explosion of white, blinding light, like when you stared at the sun for the first time. That’s all I can remember before the blackness and the stars.



I know my poet built this vessel. I know this because the craft must have been set for the moon or thereabouts. I hovered over planets and smatterings of stars. I was somewhere up there in the night sky. And I stayed there.


I never came back. I was in that craft. I hovered infinitely, disappearing infinitely, where it was quiet. It had been years.


I thought of my poet sometimes. My phone still worked out here. I kept tabs on my poet.    In the years since she got a writing fellowship, won a $35,000 grant. They published her book. It was all the poems she wrote about me.


I message her every now and again, but she never replies. I called that unknown number once. They pick up but they never say a word. I hear breathing. Sometimes I call to tell them all of this.


I think of my poet sometimes. Never once did I see any of the martians or get to talk to them. I don’t see the moon either. Maybe these are things only my poet gets to do. Even out here, in the years and years and years and years, I think of my poet sometimes.


I miss when things happened. I miss things.

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