Maybe it was a girl in front of a blacked-out door

daring you to enter.

Maybe it was the back of a rusted-out truck and the skeleton of an old piano, gutted and left for driftwood.

Maybe it was the last train, missed.

Maybe it was one last game of bejeweled or

an annual trout-fishing contest that was supposed to end by noon but always went over.

Maybe it was one last missed taxi cab. Maybe it was one last photo
taken
in a snowstorm.

There was a fire, snap-crackle. A bearskin rug and a man in the corner with wavy blond hair.
Beckoning.

Microscopic or microscope.
It’s all perspective.

I thought we were imprisoned. When we woke up marked, plaid on plaid like lawn chairs in the seventies, vinyl over vinyl under and over and through.
When we woke up marked and it was our palms, instead, fingers wrapped around bars. Horizontal.
The horizon.
So very far away.

This was our gay-pride, Burning Man, fire spinning, spun sugar marathon of bright eyes and fingernails the colour of flamingos under a CSI Miami sun, golden-glow until we all become trophies won for our best guest star in a comedy, drama, dramedy that aired on a Sunday and was heard everywhere, even while the rest of the world tried to hide their eyes behind Hockey Night in Canada while staring into the refrigerator as if it, too, had something important to say.

We’ve been here before. Wild-eyed and not listening but Van Gogh painted his bedroom three times.
It’s all viewpoint.
See where we came from and it’s all perspective.
How you look after rain and through storm clouds. Through sunbeams. Squinted eyes and some other landscape.
The view is never the same twice.
Not from here.

Reminded me of dust and moisture farms and pants the same strange beige.

I couldn’t decide what you were trying to sell me, standing there in the middle of all that white, perfume bottle in your hand and lipstick the colour of cotton candy.
I couldn’t tell what you were trying to sell me but I looked down at my pinky-toe-holed black high top shoes and frayed edges and smiled
and you looked at me
like I was a stranger and I realized whatever you were handing out was never intended for me at all.

Later they found it dented on the floor, blood-stained and crushed like it’d gone through some hailstorm.
I told them we used to fight, sometimes, but it’d gotten better since you were comatose.