“You see, rollercoasters, rollercoasters are for people who have never been in love
They want to know how it feels to just fall”

—Tank and the Bangas’ “Rollercoasters”

 

Hi Bonnie! It’s been a couple
of months (I guess a year

& a half or almost two summers
count as a couple of months, right?)

& I just wanted to ask if you
still wanted to be for-a-long-time

pals. what do you think a long time means,
anyway? Last night as I was lying 

in bed my face started to grow into a basket
of wind that remembered the back

& forth of that pirate ride at Playland.
I like the predictability of it 

& was just wondering how
you felt about being a particular

kind of pirate ship predictable
with me. I don’t mind

the brief uncertainty of suspension.
I don’t mind the out-of-body

sensation of the drop. I don’t
mind doing it again & again & again,

wondering if the earth is just a pendulum
that has broken from its fulcrum.

Bonnie, Bonnie—remember when we
would huddle together in the dark, so glad

to finally unfurl into each other’s hunger?  
How we drank our enemies’

apples irises & mouse traps, how they  
almost carved out our every atom until we

forgot what it meant to watch bad anime
on our shared crunchyroll account or sit

with our dewdrop skin? I want
to put out my fear of heights & ride

that improbable oversized boat on the waves
of cotton candy vomit & giant teddy pikachus

with you. But if you don’t want to,
that’s okay. I don’t mind. I won’t try

to find someone to replace you. Maybe
the reason you don’t need me anymore is

because we never needed each other
in the first place. We just needed

to trick ourselves. It’s like that with everything
isn’t it? It’d be a lot scarier to ride

that pirate ship alone. Oh, it’s 4:21am already.
I guess you only live a few kilometers away

so it’s 4:21am for you as well. Maybe
I’m just a few nanoseconds in the future.

In the future, I’ll still be missing you
though at a slightly different angle. I want to

look beside me & know that you’re
close when we fall. I wish we could go

look at the booths of the carnival
& buy cute bookmarks like we did that

one summer—last time I bought a new
keychain though. See? To keep

us safe on the pirate ship. We can hold it
tight & know in our bellies the fall

& swing are temporary. We’ll go up.
We’ll come down again.

I guess we’ll be riding that boat
for a long time, won’t we?