Return to Cookie Mountain Painting

Like the word, the letters that spell it out, my hand and its fingers will try to contain this. Clutching and pressing against the angles and curves of that which they cannot stand still to be without. Four collections of bone much too minuscule to capture the immeasurably of this shape that you create simply by existing, adding mystery to its form with every breathe that shakes itself free from your lungs. The words you write shape-shift in front of my eyes and unfold over expanses of white like a road map whose destination is the biggest puzzle of all. That is to say there is no end to this, even in the absence of new paths that twist and turn with the old. My thoughts following those landscapes that I had lost sight of, but my mind never forgot. Weaving their way between landmarks that I want to get lost in the memory of in those moments of wandering around the spaces of your fingers even as you slept. Losing sleep counting. Just staring at the freckles scattered across your face like glow-in-the-dark star stickers spread over a ceiling that has been stuck to the inside of my eyelids since that first morning I found you once they had opened. My favorite constellation hanging under your right eye in the shape of a crow, and that one single star set in its skull that winks like a smirking glance from under your eyelid. Four letters like your limbs holding you in place. Giving your body the ability to hold this one back, those limbs wrapped around me, squeezing the very air out of my chest just before your mouth gives it back. Four eyes locked together as we fumble from the fury of that group of pen strokes the we duplicate with our teeth, the permanent impression left behind between lips. For you, for this, for them, I hope neither of us ever stops trying to capture with that word, with any words, the essence of what our hands do their best to contain. Four letters standing together like the number of the only future I want to live within.