I don’t know the other face of the Moon. Mankind has not taught me enough to look past first appearances, and my head is always pointed towards the ground.

My doctors told me that if I did not look up more my bones would set and my ligaments would become taut like ropes bound to a ship.

Consequently I take to diving. I stare at the reflection of the moon in the inviting waters of a pool after midnight.

Light travels in straight lines, so if I can see her then she can see me too.

The other night I went home to go through the photos again. I wonder what she is doing in a world far beyond me.

Sometimes I think the moon is a metaphor for love, but then I remember love is a metaphor for the moon, which is to say that love is as meaningful as the moon, and as meaningless.

In another life I could walk underwater utterly breathless and undying and immortal.

We can only wish for God to be so kind, to give us the power to live anywhere. We can barely live as-is, so why do we go to abstractions? A question scribbled on a moray eel that surely lives in the well of my room.

I wanted to cry, so I got naked and pointed my bare self to the ceiling. With the lights off my body is a plateau, my dick a tree doubled over from lightning.

I used to be able to let the tears out like birds after 5. To fly somewhere they belong as if on schedule, and to be utterly forgotten until they do it again, day after day.

The moon, too, must be a flock of birds.

I forget how to cry, so I wrote this instead. That’s what I do – I pull to the surface everything I’ve long forgotten, dripping wet with yesterday’s memory, the fish-smell trauma a pure intensity, my room the fisherman’s net. I am a fisherman and the fish and the long-extinct shark. I am a skeleton of a fish, the wreck of a man.

I forgot why I cry, so I wrote this instead.

Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way.