An Open Letter, To the Heavens, Cosmo Randazzo

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.

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Maybe the world does end tomorrow, our bodies with it, but it’s certain that no apocalypse could cinch the waist of a well-fed love to any slim and tidy end, beautiful or otherwise. The beholder requires eyes—human eyes. If I ever decided to admit I liked blue, as a color alone (in being overly met with the mood), it would solely be the hue of your irises. In acknowledging that the sky and the sea, perhaps, are the only earthly reservoirs for that particular shade, I’ve made a fool of the catastrophe by which the universe naively promises humanity’s demise. You will always exist somewhere, against chaos itself. Even as you sleep, eyes shut, ivory shoulders sunken and textured with goosebumps, you protect this blue to end all blues. How jealous those bulbous, ashen clouds will be, crowded and gaping over us—how envious the poisoned green seas as they spread our buildings like jam over the earth with tidal forces, drowning everything, becoming darker. All you’ll have to do is wake up tomorrow, and I will run this linguistic thread between your eyes and the blue heavens forevermore. In this way I’m sure the world won’t end.

Even then, I remember, Neptune exists, somewhere far enough to feel like home. “Good morning,” you whisper. I’m sure of it.

35 Quaranzine