summer moves past you like you’re standing still, clouds seven miles tall pull the peaks of the front range into private conversations. these days you’re feeling less like a person and more like his unfinished house project, half-framed, clippings and cuttings and misplaced hardware. 

you talk on the phone with a Bay Area friend you’ve always looked up to, she shares your appreciation of insane women and knights you with Intimacy Issues. you share a baguette and a long Montclair walk with another friend, who has a perfect memory and hates that most times you can’t remember yesterday; you interrupt each other like it’s tennis. you snap impatiently at the men in your life for no reason, and you get canceled on for the third probably-not-a-date in a row. maybe you'll reschedule, but it might be better if you don’t.

on sunday morning the air smells like green chiles and sprayed-on sunscreen: the july heat sneaking up from new mexican deserts presses on your chest like the confident palms of a chance non-binary lover-for-now met on the club patio who's built like a god and speaks to you in a purring, dizzyingly overfamiliar tone. you walk for a few hours, and when you get home, sweaty and brooding and internal, throw on that chameleons record and stare at mountains, until an afternoon storm hides them away again.