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209 Brian Oliu Contra In your first life, you were foolish—running where you shouldn’t be running, crashing into trees, touching everything you saw. In your next life, you were more cautious—ducking when things were thrown your way, jumping over crevasses. In your next life, the sky started to fall in—talons of birds you have never seen in any of your lives. In the lives after that you began to understand the world that you were placed in: that things, terrible things, can come at you from behind, from underneath. To be swept off one’s feet only to fall again from the sky, curled up in a ball, rotating. When I saw you, surrounded, you were aware of the names of things—you knew that when you jumped you could move back and forth in midair like a balloon, like wings, like spiraling. You knew what things to touch—wings that fell from the sky like you once did after the sixteenth time that you died, wings that would make you stronger—wings that allowed you to remove self from self, to streak ahead of your body like a flashlight, turning all things to white. In this life, you do not know the world that we live in. You do not know how quickly the seasons change, how fast it can go from leaves as thick as bulbs, from snakes moving with a quickness, from mosquitoes biting your white legs while we sit in the backyard. You look like the type that smokes cigarettes: you will not let me light it for you. In a past life, you would have let me come closer, would have let me bring my hand as close to your mouth as possible without touching it, allowing you to breathe on my hand before snapping your neck upward and exhaling. You are always looking up. You are always pressing your chin to your chest while you walk, as if you can see through the ground that we walk on, as if there is something in the water. There is always 210 brian oliu something in the water: there is nothing I can do about this. Believe me when I say that I am the only one: I do not control the fire. I do not control the mouths on doors, the sickles. Yet you blame me for it. You blame me for being here: for the roaches that try to crawl into your ears while you sleep, that cause you to forget how to exhale, how to breathe on my hand. You heard a story about their white blood, about living on without a head, about how they will run to your hands if you have been cutting onions for soup. Do not worry about these things. Do not worry about your eyelashes being eaten while you are sleeping. Do not worry about the rat that lived underneath my crib when I was a child, about how it would scale the bedpost like you climbing up to where the water falls. These are things to worry about elsewhere. These are for future lives to worry about. You, in your new life have no time to rest. Rest is a number. To talk is a number. This has nothing to do with change, with having to get to work, with throwing an onion at your back. I do not know if you have time to sit down: to have a meal, to talk about things—the world you are trying to save, the people you are trying to defend. I am scared to touch your hand in fear that you might die. I am scared to make a noise in fear that I might die. When you leave here, you will step incorrectly. You will fall from the sky like you always do. You will start running forward. You will restart where you fell, circling—the yard, the kitchen. You will keep going and you will remember none of this—how you got out of this building, why you arrived, why all of the roaches are dead, why it is snowing, why we are wearing white. If you were to remember me, you would remember me as faceless. You would remember my motions—where I arrived from, when I jumped, what patterns I made. You would remember that you cannot touch me, or else you would fall to the ground. I would tell you that to touch my skin is worth dying...

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