AN OPEN LETTER, TO THE HEAVENS Cosmo Randazzo
Unfortunately, we both sleep as if the world is ending tomorrow, although the matter of urgency remains subjective; your breathing becomes viscous within minutes, because, if the world were on its last leg, this is the final night of temporary sleep you would get, the last pillowy descent and the last bright awakening. The ultimacy lulls you, a glass of warm milk laced with cyanide. Meanwhile, I stay awake, neck craned forward, daunted and rushed, hip bone pressed to your side as a point of contact, typing away at a memoir that is utterly perishable at the mercy of Armageddon. By dawn: a written account of one human life (mine), and the purest version of you— just sleeping which rivals paper and pen for accuracy, flammability, and delicacy. The world isn’t ending, of course, but we’ll both wake up with the same polar attitudes: you will lazily roll over my back, belly down, and release half your body weight onto my lungs out of golden affection, under which I will squirm like a wounded bird, ignorant to its own broken wing, unacquainted with gentle, writhing with fear that the most terrible thing—the reaping of flight—could happen again, only by your hand. Instead, I’m lifted by a thousand rounded balloons at 7:00 in the morning, all filled by your weightless breaths throughout the night’s slumber. Your well-restedness, as it were, puts padded springs under my lower back, a pillow behind the nape of my neck, and sends me into an earthbound dream before work.
Anthology 7
34
