We were naked in the dark, chasing fireflies and wiping wet grass off our feet. We took turns falling on our faces — on our backs. We laughed so loud. We sang so loud the leaves fell off their branches and made puddles on the ground for us to hide in. We buried ourselves under their spiky stems and crunchy skins, camouflaged with our soft, brown skin. We were warm. Our fingers were magnets always reaching for each other or stuck to something else cold. Our fingers were vines twisting, entangled, and clingy. Our fingers wrote messages in the dirt and in the air: lyrics from acoustic songs, lines from favorite movies that made us feel, words we wanted to yell at the people in our lives, words we wanted to whisper into the other. When the moon disappeared we climbed up the silhouette trees and strung pictures from one accusing top to another. We dug holes into the sky and filled them with black glitter. We scratched our autographs under the tiny speck we thought was Saturn then watched the fireflies beneath us dance in circles faster and faster and faster and faster and faster until we grew dizzy and let go. We were never naked; we were vulnerable.

Three flights ago I was flying above a mountain range where the trees were so tiny I’m sure if you sneezed, they would have scattered like spit.Two fights ago you pinched me so hard I became a statue tense with the desire to punch a crater in your thigh. For all the analogies and metaphors we make comparing sections of our bodies to the sections of the earth- we haven’t seen that much. We’ve never climbed to the peaks of our mountain nipples nor seen the cracked and glowing fingers of lava nor sled down the continental slope in between our lungs. We breathe smoke: I breathe it out, you breathe it in-and when we pick flowers to decorate our toenails we pick apart their petals searching for the how and why they form the form they do. Why a radiating mandala instead of a straight line from a to b to z. When we wander, we always find the trails lined with love letters and dead grass oragamied into crosses, baskets, bridges for bright red ants. We always find a clearing where we always lie down and watch planes crash through clouds and make bets about when it will be our turn.