The electron does anything it likes… It just goes in any direction
at any speed, forward or backward in time…
—Richard Feynam
Back then she has her legs jack-knifed up towards her chest, joints pushed
against the blanket that’s between her and the door, his head against her haunches, his crooked right arm reaching behind her, brushing digit-tips
against her neck-hairs. Perhaps there is electro-stat between her and his
knuckle-down, or even at the barely there frontier between their limbs
that keeps the heat in them. Heading into hinterland with friends of friends
they’ve known each other only days, yet now they touch so much that you
could run a line without a break between his feet and her forehead at the glass,
both pressed against the sped-past lowland dark they almost are,
here on this journey that they’ve called ‘a chance to disappear’.
That’s how our bodies seem, asleep, like landscapes in the dark or water—
all made of the same matter. As if when we say ‘drift off’ we mean ‘apart’
and waking is our self assembling again. Like the way the two of them
will come together, sometime between the words ‘Back then’ and this border-crossing—as if colliding. These bodies are ours to break, to smash against
each other, or to hurl into the night.