Kala

by Colin Walsh

It’ll be a test of ourselves, our willingness to meet the moment.

time dilates into something unstable

in the roar of that moment it feels like we’re foam becoming ocean.

I’m the wrong side of thirty and I still love it when summer bursts over this town.

People are coiled like a spring. They wanna dance, they wanna sweat, they wanna fuck. They want.

she was giving that to me, my friend, giving me a world, and I loved it and I was scared of it and I loved how scared I was of it because that meant it was real.

We were inside something now, Kala and me. Cradled in the core of a thing that allowed us to say stuff like that.

What mattered was she was looking to you for comfort, even though you were the one hurting her. The feeling was pale and still. The sense of something being securely fixed in place, even if that meant it first had to be broken.

In town, by the canal. Vodka buzz. Birds perched on wires like ink silhouettes. Etchings against the sky. Used to stop and linger over sights like this. Used to look at them and not think anything, just let the image look into you. Sights like this, this small gap between Kinlough rooftops threading birds on a wire, how these moments imprinted themselves on you as a kid, when you were young enough that the rain on the cobblestones with the music in your headphones and a few dark birds on a wire would re-map your imagination, how moments like this conjured the coordinates between which your dreams still ping back and forth, the burning points from which your life’s lived, the walls against which your heart hammers when you’re alone and fucked in the dark.

Your brain’s a static thing, stodgy, old, and you need to hold everything in distinct linear blocks. But life isn’t like this—it doesn’t come in neat episodes, it leaks and twists and knots and coils.