A short list of things that didn’t happen when we hugged in the hotel bar
The butterflies in my stomach bursting out through my throat, hyperventilation, my fingers becoming roman candles igniting where I touched you, a second spiritual awakening, myocardial infarction, lighting strike through the temporal lobe, realizing I was wrong for admiring you from afar for so many years, a panic attack, my body giving up my heart just to hear it thud onto the floor, the moon falling out of the sky & striking me down, regretting that I slid into your dm’s on the advice of a woman who was so high she could hear the trees talking, ick, the plastic crocodile next to the bar coming to life to swallow me, my arms detaching from my body in favor of never letting you go, an existential crisis, realizing that your eyes are actually quite dull & not dark universes that house every story that I’d ever want to tell, writer’s block, instant & unavoidable death, any anxiety at all, awareness of the cold indifference of the universe creeping in to let me know that everything is temporary & we are all going to die, melting into a pool of slime, whatever Brittany Broski does when she talks about Aaron Taylor Johnson, spontaneous combustion.
LE Francis (she/her) is a recovering arts journalist writing poetry & fiction of varying length from the rainshadow of the Washington Cascades. Find her online at nocturnical.com.