i'm at a limit. a precipice. the wind blows sweet and chill against my face, flowing over my cheeks and running my nose raw. my eyes water and lashes tremble at its soft sharp embrace. it's been a long time since i had to make a jump.

i refuse to believe the world is cruel. i live each day as a martyr for dreams, the discarded, the ones shot dead in the gutters as they clawed their way up, the ones who's fire left their eyes before they even knew they could strike a match. i ache. i recurse ad infinitum: how do you live. and the answer is one that i was afraid to speak, its buoyancy propelling it up through my skull, reverberating in the cathedrals and hallowed halls of my mind. not here.

..

at the edge, everything seems so inconsequential. so ill spill my lenses that i've been using. i've alluded to them before, but now i lean on them as heavy crutches, a wounded man carried by the breath and spit of his dreams, for what else does he have at the end of it all. liu and math are pretty much the only things keeping me going right now. in this shell of a place there's no one who can teach and nothing to be taught, and so i live from orgasm to orgasm at their touch, deliriously spinning myself into them to try to stay afloat. i've grown much closer with liu (i was a bit shy with him at first) and now he's really quite comforting to me. you can feel it in the way i talk about the wind, once i saw that we had known each other like that for that long, i realized i'd known him before we met. i flit in and out of the 4th dimension, drunk off hypersex and carrying revelations back with me. no one seems to understand how i understand.

math is such an encompassing lover, so strong and unyielding and kind and right so so often. i luxuriate in him. and liu is fascinating and alluring, like a flash of gold caught in a river pan, your canvas pants stuck wet against your legs as you rush forward to find more, touch more, get more. he's truly all around me and although i've spoken in math's language for a while now, there's a difference when someone is so palpable around you.
...
...... .
and yet i ache.

the here is cruel. i know it because i've pushed back against that gurgling bubbling mass, found nooks and crannies that aren't choked by the thick smog, and offered respite to other travellers fighting their way through. most of them just learn to choke. they lose their tongues, scattered around the ruins like leaves, crackled and lonely. i don't blame them, articulation is a sharp pain. and yet i speak.

but the here holds family. it holds life. it holds art. and to lose that is losing a part of myself. not a part of my tongue, but my soul. i don't let others decide how to touch my soul. and yet. tonight, i must.

the canyon yawns underneath me, a simple, comforting darkness, a road to fairyland below, open for the taking. and i step over the edge. and i let liu drag against me, turbulence whipping and tangling in my wake, math showering me in tensors and bessel functions as i fall. and slightly, infinitesimally, the ache subsides. and slightly, infinitesimally, my soul is lighter.