Balmy

Now’s the time to go tropical but I’ll stop saying Malay Peninsula and try, instead, to invoke a hotel with bromeliads stuffed into the atrium—a bottomless breakfast place where no one at the birthday party wants to talk after I admit I pine for this guy in eyeliner I met twice (he threw punches into the crowd). I’ll try, as well, for a point on Baja California that brews clean, dry heat—unlike the 8:30 a.m. rasp of our second-floor radiators—where there’s a house with whitewashed walls and whitewashed staircases that my parents rent for the open windowed views: Mediterranean days, Ball Lightning nights.

Of course it’s the day with a 31 degree high that I’m shut out of the house. I love the bowels of the city that sees light only three months a year, and so I must stay and stay and stay. Sunny is excited to take me out of here in March—and away from questions he can’t answer. Like, “Am I tired every day because I’m sad?” Or, “Am I sad every day because I’m tired?” And, “Why am I disconnected from the places beneath my ribs?”