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And the plane took off and it swallowed time whole, and the clouds looked like the bottom of a boot, when the snow is packed in real tight, and my tears went back into my eyes like they were never there at all, way back into my head where they sat and drowned me, from the inside and out and I’m sure I looked like a broken baby with three fingers or a head swollen to ten times its size and I felt like that too, like I would never get it, never understand why you can’t trap things in little bottles and screw the lid on tight, so tight and carry them around with you, clinking together, and never open them again but know they are there, know that you could open the bottle and be back there, one time only, and experience it all again - how I can tell when you’re dreaming while you sleep, how we make a nest in my bed, how you breathe in and out like a vacuum cleaner, how your leg and your arm are the safest limbs in the world, like guns, like bars to keep me in, cage me maybe, but that you and me are glasses that stack perfectly on top of each other, into each other – but perhaps it will never be that way again, perhaps I will chip or you will warp and there never were any glass jars to put you in, to put IT in, to put the whole of IT in, the days and hours, the parts that defied everything I knew.

My nose is running now, I suppose some part of me had to weep. For you. For how frightened I am. For the plane and the clouds and the tears that wouldn’t come. For the future.