Everything I would ever say to you I said inside that vestibule. Where we were never alone. All our architecture was pretext, or liminal. An apparatus of immoderate stalling came to define my speech. Corners where we lingered became your face. Premonition axled close, but I was too wet to see, and clawing. A total absence of clocks was the only balm in our room that was not really a room. Its lightswitch flicks on thunderstorms, even now. Raindrops not tears, I’d say going back inside, veiled, smiling. Each time the door opened, we diluted. Each time the door closed; your caress, my stuttering flesh. Each time the door opened—you stopped listening, and the voice of epilogue warped everything. Until words broke apart. Then, one day, the door unhinged itself entirely. Not opening or closing, the door goes on in me this way.

It was a shortcut. Not in distance, not in time, but to reconfiguration, so total one could smell it. Propelled by the kind of curiosity that prefigures doubt, yes, holy. And soon doubt I would, every name they had given to me. Iron box names, safe as a cage is safe. Not warm. Doubt finds the seams. It’s how crates become coffee tables. Seams are radicals of change. I was lucky this way. Loose seams from the beginning, once my embarrassment, now my beginning in the middle, late adolescence. Not yet twenty. To live, if only just barely, someplace else: a desire turned strategy to learn with my hands the form and content of a city, Montreal, form and content my body would take on, with pleasure, the form and content of this place being baggy, ample room for important kinds of play. The ocean to dive in was a dumpster. It was more politics than poetry despite my time spent excessively with the latter until it encased me like a snow globe’s scene; syllables and rhyme schemes, other schemes, too, like how much and what time and the microscales after, the flakes kept falling. Never had I lived where it snowed as often as it did not snow. Never had I known the feeling of new landscapes raining down each morning, hours measured in melting or hardening into, again, another shape still. Into ice, I scratched her first name. Next to my first name. It was beautiful because it couldn’t last, not my name, not her face. At the time, I specialized in courses on gender and sexuality and bodies and screens, with no idea why this was my specialty. So, in concert with the sidewalk’s slope, we changed. Things change like city parks change depending on the day. On sundays the grass field lining avenue du parc, the mountain’s royal mouth, enacts slow counter methods to capital and its gain. All the city briefly the same age, drumming, vivid, stretched between smoking, shaking in discussion, selling fabric and sharing mason jars dripping Heiffweisen, barrel aged. Form and content, baggy, even now. It was on that grass, on the cusp of a grove of ash trees specifically, I first started calling for a new first name. Incessantly listening for the sound of a smooth change. Accidentally, the year changed. Four times, all while I was simply trying to clear my throat. Immediate and elastic, each day, every Montreal. Before summer and after spring when I scratched in again our names. The difference was my name was shorter now, clicks instead of sings. Gave up the vowels, heavy things. Another difference: not ice, but a linden tree. We begin again this way, she said to me. Or shouted vertically, from up the linden’s ribcage. I still know the one exactly. The city disposed of it for an expanding bagel chain that I will never eat inside of because I don’t agree. It was only ever her, for whom I saved the extra parking spot, though neither of us had a car. Or a license. Not a choice as much as a laboratory in returning, what that can make between two bodies that know other bodies throughout and in between. When I remember all our beginnings it’s kind of like church bells, the sound in my ribcage. Louder, though. Talking about her was like speaking in tongues, no one understood me, and, mostly, I was lying when I said I understood what I was saying, that I knew her. I was making sounds that sounded exciting. Speaking in tongues is trashy in a high order camp way. Then there was the microsdoing, its expansion into the macro. The city simplifies into bottle shops and warehouses of moving bodies on nights like these, salt and steel, antithetical to crescendo speeds. Smoking is not breathing, there I’d remind myself of need. Despite all the Parisians, whose beauty I adored and still adore. She was nowhere near when I stopped collaborating with shame I had first selected in alleyways. Grinding flesh to be somewhere. What weighs more, a city or a name?