For a brief instant I am awake out of my mind. Confined no longer by rhetorical disease, I climb. I await nothing. No one is coming. The tree branches endlessly. I rise with ease. Paradise echoes in dreams. I am still. I am watching. I observe silently. The sounds are justifying, but I have nothing left to say. My love is safe. She signifies the suffering. She bares witness to the execution of her kind. She cries deeply. The weight of it begs her body to the ground. On the ground below me she sighs, a great intensity breathed. Her baby eyes, all knowing, seen as deformity. She is ill by nature of habituating this place. She is short tempered. I bind her fury with the roots of existence. I tell her a story. “Once upon a time the sorrow of life lived in abundance. The manner of these living things were not dictated by greed. And desire ruled, directed by a lust for truth. Communication was an honest telling from spirit to body to body to self. Fear was reserved for immediate danger. Such danger was a love left free to roam. I would hold you here. But I could not take you with me. Thus freedom and slavery were the same thing, so long as it was never written. The explanations were irrelevant. Once upon any time, the space is every place and this moment contains every story in existence.” I close my eyes and tear myself from waking sleep. She asks me what I’ve seen. “I’ve seen the universe on repeat for as long as it’s held itself in material form. I’ve seen her story told over again, every soul struggling to remember time itself. I’ve seen my love witness their despair. Sadness is all that she knows. I’ve seen my body struggle to breathe. Assimilation is my destiny and still I refuse. To suffer as you do is to feel nothing. So I feel it all for you. You are intoxicating. I observe. The illusion fades. You are naked and there is nothing I can do but remember you.” Dear boy, for all that it’s worth, scream! Scream like your soul’s resistance to the decay depended entirely on the octave reached. Dear girl, breathe. You can whisper if you please. You needn’t utter a single sound ever again if your voice deceives.