We lingered on the line between steady and still.

We were parasitic plants, contorted in abject apathy, aggressively entwined with the unnatural sunlight, lying to our retinas, painting our dreams an undead blue-white, our eye-whites red, our fingers crackling like embers over pillowy pieces of plastic. It was probably late, or otherwise approaching; we always return to lateness; it is how we sleep; it is the bed upon which we sleep.

Somewhere within our devices, neurons or machine guns fire. Something flickers beneath the metal sheath our wrists decay upon. The screen shines like a newborn star, and it burrows into our pores, seizing our eyes from behind and slowly squeezing the spirited gleam out of them, wringing us of our natural verve, corrupting our souls — changing our goals, blackening the lungs of our brains, until we had to hide every tarred breath with webbed words. Our untruths, like our screen-beds, were comfortable. When you asked us what we were doing or which spiders crawled from our eyes or why night tugged at our feet, we lied through our chattering teeth in a sodden attempt to stave off the waves of frosty cortisol that chase us. They are hounds, and we foxes; our only dagger was time; lies merely put distance between them and us.

And you.

You who wielded the heaviest weapon of all. You who took your minds gently between your jowls and carried them somewhere far away, somewhere where seconds didn’t fall into oblivion like silvery sand. You who believed our breath-mints of wispy lies and ignored the stench of paranoia that wreathed our heads whenever we spoke to you. You whom we twisted into redness. It was difficult for us to believe that you saw us all along, sinking into the cushions on our beds, letting the hours grow old and die, and pricking our skin a million times with a million needles because none of us can exert a force without a counterforce pushing back, and such is the case with faithlessness. To lie to one’s parents is to lie to oneself; it is to convince each artery, each vein, each contracted capillary woven into one’s own flesh of something not false, but wrong; something shimmering with fake blue-white gold. Every lie was really just a woe unto us. Us, us, us, us, us. That means “you and me”. The truth is, truth is difficult, but not so difficult as pressing the “u” and “s” letters on a keyboard in quick succession. There is us in trust. And there we are, sitting at our keyboard, and you’re gone, and once again we return to a blank page, and the hounds come crashing back, but up close it appears that they’re wagging their tails, harder, harder, white fur almost blue in this light, this undead starry light, but perhaps, mother, I could learn to tame them, running around on webbed toes but with wispy honesty now, and a frost has fallen now. There is a certain unalienable realness, we think, to the lifting of frozen wrists, to the contact of silvery eyes. To the admission of failures. To the remaining of hope. There is an unalienable trueness that is steady and still.

So I shall lift my wrists, and my eyes, and the rest of my limbs, in quick succession and fasten my heart upon yours — my mind that is not true, but right — and discard at last my persistent ostensibility — as easy and infuriatingly precipitous as tapping away a small tear — and tell you the truth. Even if it means I must uproot the soil-soul-sucking weeds and shatter the screens every minute, at every infinitesimal juncture, I will do it, if only for you and for the slender sliver of moonlight that’s been illuminating a dusty corridor in my mind. The one I realized once again that I might, if lucky, brush the pads of my toes and thawing fingertips against someday.