Little Acts of Haunting

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It is night when I realize I love the girl. Night when she tells me she loves me. I imagine her hands / neck / back, my fingernails pressing half-moons into her thighs. We come up for air on occasion—when we feel like it—which is almost never at all. She parts my eyelashes like curtains, like a moth unfurling its powdered wings, like the spreading of our legs—breath hitched on the edge of something sharper—something deadly. When she finds the mole on my lower eyelid, I tell her what it means. 爱哭鬼, is the phrase in my head—the way my grandmother says it. But I can only tell her what it means in English, which is to say: crying ghost, which is really only part of what it means. She is trying to smudge my crying mole, as if to press her finger to something is to make it disappear. I want to disappear. To love her is to die. Finger pressed on eyelid, skin pressed on skin. Two girls, coming into existence. Two ghosts, two bloody-mouthed hungry ghosts. It is night when I realize I love her. Night when I am starving. Night when she touches me, ebbing away. There is a girl, and my voice, saying: we can survive this. Listen, I am always trying to write us out of this.

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