Text Messages to the Long Distance Groupchat

let’s retire together. watch the

sun sink from our homes lined up

in this suburban american way

that we used to scorn as our hearts

sink in our chests. we’ll listen to

marium’s music (meticulously tuned

guitar and some wrenchingly

teenage lyrics, new love under

ancient indigo skies, ‘new and

ancient are interchangeable here,’

a look bleeding over the shoulder)

fall in love over and hate over hate

and over love again under new

indigo skies, listen to gwen philosophize

over the dao (worn book at least

sixty years old drenched in decades

of midnight flashlight, baptized

monthly with tea and coffee and

every drink we weren’t there to

drink with you), let things take their

natural course. let the sun sink. let

your tits sag, the skin around your

cheeks loosen, the joints in your

hands tighten. let the adolescent

sex drive melt like old silverware

to be repurposed into that cosmic

acceptance that retirement homes

boast unwittingly, with their pictures

of sunlight condensed into beams,

dissolving onto the surface of a

green lake by the golf course,

those uncanny pristine fields that

speak of creation at the intersection

of apocalyptic divine nascence

and the blueprint of human trash—

pictures that induce the sound of

bach’s cello fugues by visual cue.

we’ll listen to gabriel’s ramblings

about the universe and think about

our quantum superpositions among

all these superclusters (‘stupid

super-determinists,’ the wave of a

hand commanding the sinking sun,

‘how could you think everything is

fated when we’re only made of

indecisive dust?’ at the cross

section of particle and wave, dusk

and dawn, the microscopic

annihilations happening all at

once everywhere between positive

and negative, we knew we could

use the most of it) and god fuck it

let’s retire together. because i’ll

love you in that way we didn’t

know how to name when we first

learned how to drive and compared

the driving tests of our regions

together and i’ll love you in the only

way that was the only thing we knew

and perhaps the only thing we know

and it’s a crime to only know how

to love in a world that pushes itself

further and further into supernova

each day and fuck it let’s just fucking

retire together so in the end we’ll

have someone to watch the end

credits with


Also by Vanessa Y. Niu

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