You are walking to the train station. The ticket window is closing. The best things are hard won. At home the clothesline is sagging toward the earth, it never stops raining so your clothes are never dry. Your hands are cold and nauseous. The last thing you ate was thirteen hours ago. There are still pieces of it in your teeth. You're lost in a place you've always been. Walking around these constants that never become old friends: I think I do, I think I do, I can't, I can't, I think I do. One of your knees won't bend all the way. Bike accident. Ten years old. Memory is an avenue you walk around late at night with no shoes on. Rainwater drips down your face, you suck it into your mouth. It's salty. You've been crying. Memory is a circle you pace until the line splits flat. And then it ends. No more consequences. You try to jump off into an abyssal nowhere that forces you to repent for things you can't bear to admit to yourself. Maybe you are in love after all. That sort of disease will make anyone crazy. There are three small worms burrowing into the corner of your right eye. They want to tunnel into your optical canal until everything you look at has three holes burned into it. Your father was a bastard who never let you cry. The cycle of violence continues until you walk through the centre of the small circle. You have to feel it all. Your home life is a comfortable sweater you slip on and take off as soon as the sun hits you. But you could lose an arm in the cold without that sweater. Or you could float to the top of a body of water like a cadaver found alive. The relief would be exhausting. You could kiss the light tilting like shattering glass, bouncing off her wet body. You convince yourself you can breathe underwater. Her heart won't break yours if the timing is right. Time doesn't conform. Eat the clock. Your heart is a tunnel full of inconsolable missed chances. Being human is a series of unconscionable fuck-ups. The sky moves in a circle, a tree marks another line of age inside its chest. You'll never see it unless you cut it open—how old you have become. Last night, the moon flung herself from the sky and split into a quarter million tiny stars, clinging to the grass like dewdrops sick with light. You fell in love with a woman whose wooden face opened like a hatch, her eyes light up like candles that never get shorter. You walk inside her head and are afraid of the smell, like sauna, woodsmoke, cedar, Irish cream, nervous tension, a rainstorm, old books, time melted on a gas stove. Your life is a series of performances up until now. The ceiling of her skull is a nest full of birds. Her cheekbones are a series of riddles. It's cold but you find you don't need a sweater. You want to kiss deep inside her. The whole world is in a courtship with the ocean. You're too afraid to touch the walls, to feel your body against a surface so wet with life. You instead become a comet that splits the sky in two, your hands falling down to meet your aging body. It's a little chilly here, so you zip up your sweater. The train leaves in twelve minutes. Your eyes are dry.

Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real or imagined hopeless romantic time travelling shape shifters with wooden faces is purely coincidental.