the movement of the moon.

When fog envelopes the City and the stench of the cows settles into all of the corners of Central California, my city remains warm and sunny. A few clouds pass overhead. I crane my neck upwards and count: 1, 2, 3... 4. Sometimes I strain to see shapes in the sparse summer clouds, but right now, they are just there to be there.

Those four clouds, their simple presence, swallows up the postcard you sent, the 160-character text messages that pass through the air inexplicably, the phone conversations that last anywhere from one minute to four short hours. The clouds are here. They are now.

There is poetry in the presence of things.

This is an antiquated notion.

Because more than my own propensity toward romantic idealizations, I know there is also poetry in the present absences that technology creates. Your words float on waves from behind your chocolate eyes, down to your thumbs, and to me so far away. When I think of your words this way, I can also imagine how fitting they are. Like the way you looked when you caught that wave in Malibu, the way your body shined with the sun and the water, the way the word "amazing" surged through my body just as you let your body drop. My stomach turned upside down with the distillation of you. And then you floated on waves as you paddled toward me through the water, me counting down the seconds, you reaching for my hand as we sat in the middle of the ocean. As we held hands, the words we spoke felt endless.

In the ocean, we were insignificant. Your 160 characters are insignificant too, even when I try to find beauty in their presence. They're always smashed up against each other, always aching from abbreviation. I read them in one second and they disappear, swallowed whole. Compared with our long talks, they seem to enter an abyss that I can never fill with anything worthwhile. I erase them. But I find that you always replenish them with new words. So, no matter what I do, our words keep floating back and forth, across phone lines, across mailboxes, in letters left on your pillow, in all the short text messages.

Yes, I still have five weeks to pretend that all the words are greater than the ever-presence of the present. You cannot live your life in between ephemeral words. You can only live your life for that antiquated beauty of what is here for you now. This is the painful blessing of realization you have brought me.