Dear –––– | The Moon

Hannah Rodabaugh

The moon was up last night like an opioid lunatic. I ran towards it once with my tongue out to taste the moonlight. I was in the desert. The moon gabled up over the sky like a kind of thrombosis. It tasted of old silver melted together till one glutinous mess like glass; it tasted amorphous. I wondered how my tongue had become a shiny intractable metal, but could not see enough of my face to tell, and you were not there to ask. I said, if we ever traveled to the moon together, we would be unhappy. Everything would be glass and silver. There would be no privacy––and so, we would be depressed. Minds need walls to function, even yours. When glass stands in for an absence of boundaries, it frightens us. Somehow, this was about relationships, about a species that can connect to each other through absence. It was about the nightingale, stiff, unsinging, as light rolled over us. No one ever gives us permission to have a voice. No one gives us permission to say––towards. The panging sky with white eye engulfed was only distance, unreadably dark to us––unreadably dark because what is the distance between two people compared to bodies in space? I don’t know if it is atrophy to write like this. It presupposes listening, and it hurts. But mouths were meant to move towards. Speaking is all inflections and verbs, inflections and verbs––towards. We cannot exist without others.