When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

by Chen Chen

We fell in love in midair.

I was 13 & it was night & all night I stared at the moon from my tree, willing myself to think not of them, but of how it would taste to kiss, to be kissed, oh moon, for a long time, for the first time, to be k-i-s-s-i-n-g in this or any tree . . .

oh moon, hungry moon, unkissed & silent, I would kiss you.

I wanted you to suffocate, breath-starved from all the miles you’d run away from me.

I don’t have time for their secrets tonight.

What is it, to remember nothing, of what one loved? To have forgotten the faces one first kissed?

Why did I never consider how different spring could smell, feel, elsewhere? First light, last scent, lost country. First & deepest severance that should have prepared me for all others.

I saw violence in anything with a face. I wished for a place big enough for grief, & all I got was more grief,

I didn’t intend to meet you & you yourselves were probably hoping for better. But isn’t this how it happens? Aren’t all great love stories, at their core, great mistakes?

I want to be a sweetheart in every moment,

Now, I am in love—with you!—though sometimes terribly sad for no good reason, & not so much angry as guilty when you say to me, Don’t cry, don’t be sad, as if my sadness could sink this room, this apartment, this whole city not Paris. But does my sadness always need to be your sadness? I wish I could write an elegy for my sadness because it has suddenly died. I wish I could mourn it by kissing you again & again while neither of us can stop laughing, a kind of kiss where we sometimes miss the mouth altogether, a kind of kiss I think every single dead person in every part of the world must crave with violent impossibility.

Will I just have to make room? Do I have any left?

hold tender both spilled & lost,

being moved by each other’s stillnesses.

unable to finish things & not wanting to,

Think of peace & how the Buddhists say it is found through silence. Think of silence & how Audre Lorde says it will not protect you.

Think of silence as a violence, when silence means being made a frozen sea.

Racked by doubt, but not yet wrecked by it,

I’d like to sound sexy again,

The child is happy. The afternoon, a novel.

I will miss the particular quiet of my body, your body, opening a window to listen.

You are an unhappy thing, cursed with legs, every step carrying the love who left, the love you left,

But the sorrow is held by your heart now, your own exquisite machine that seems finally to contain it.

Solitude lover seeks more of the same.

In one pocket, chapstick. In the other, racist comments from people who claim to be postracial. Or kind.

I forgot to fear abandonment & abandoned myself beautifully to sleep,

Too much not enough just right but just for now & then it was winter.

Paris, lopsided, was still Paris. A congregation, a conflagration.

I tried to ask my parents to leave the room, but not my life. It was very hard. Because the room was the size of my life. Because my life was small.

Raising one’s voice in a small space felt at once godlike & childish.

Why can’t you see me? Why can’t I stop needing you to see me? For someone who looks like you to look at me,

But every kind of someone needs someone else to insist with.

For he looks happy & doesn’t know I’m looking & that makes his happiness free.

uncompass me with your tender

want to shiver against you, into you. I want the sound of your teeth.

the early morning light falling on your lovely someone’s lovable bare feet as he walks across the wood floor to sit by the window, by the plants, with a cup of jasmine & a book he will barely open but love to hold the weight of in his lap.

The bees decide to visit me I try to stay still so they can visit properly & am returned to my body