I haven’t set the schedule. I haven’t made the light switch obedient. I haven’t logged into the terminal or made my bones any warmer. I haven’t seen anyone like you before or thought it possible I could meet anyone like you at a time like this in a world like this. I haven’t been to the places you have been or made the kinds of friends you have made or touched the things you’ve touched. The jelly membrane of the skin of your fingers sets a heat into my shoulder when you place your hand on my shoulder and say, what you say when you say it. I fill up the glass with opaque seltzers such a combination as you’d call a “suicide,” and we debate about its flavor’s integrity to the original concoctions from which it was made. I bite my upper lip in thought and mentally repeat the word I was told to repeat to regulate my breathing and lower its focal point along my torso. You tell me people are like their own cups of coffee all different mixtures and types on the inside but, outside, exactly similar. The same cardboard sleeves. The same plastic lids. The same 12 oz. paper cups. You tell me of the few who survived their dives into Niagara Falls. You tell me of ancient Norse mythologies and the presence of these mythologies’ monsters in your more recent dreams. You tell me of what it means to be the type of person whose light switch is obedient, broken-in, tamed. We sit and discuss many things within things. We sit and sip beers and placate the room’s heat with light clothing and minimal movement. We get up and retrieve cool bottles from the refrigerator and pop open the bottles with mistlike plumes. And we clack the bottles together and say “cheers,” what we say when we say it, and ingest. You tell me about the dream of the wintry forest and the eminent Jötunn, of the bleached-white cloudscape and the powdered snow whose hoofprints encircle you. You tell me of the red-tipped antlers and the sounds it makes and imitate the sounds as you heard them in your dreams, and I cannot describe the sounds.
You say what you say when you say it, and mention the dream recurrently throughout the conversation. You mention your broken bleeding leg staining the immediate snow cherry-red and how you are so scared of this thing with antlers, partially obscured by dead trees, staring at you. You mention how you cannot move and how you are stuck and how you cannot imagine feeling such a level of fear in real life. My hand wanders its way to yours, and we touch, and my fingers interlace with yours, and you look at me in the eyes from what feels like a great distance.