I imagine your fingers unfolding this letter.
I see you, sitting on your porch, a beer beside you, leaving imprints of soil from your garden in the margins, as you smooth it out to read. I see your mouth, moving over occasional words as you sometimes do.
I found it amongst the rubble of a residential street, lying under torn books and broken beams, somehow intact. Nearby, in a half-buried drawer, a fresh ream of paper. I salvaged it, brought it back to the shelter.
I touch my fingertips to the letters that spell your name, tenderly, as if touching your skin; your lips, your temples, the solidity of your palms. The letters leap and arc through the air on their metallic trapezes, marking the paper as my kisses long to mark the salted nape of your neck, warm from the sun. My fingers find you again through old typeface, find the memory of us in the spaces between letters.
Typing your name cracks open the place inside where I have buried my love for you.
The sturdy letters remind me of stories you introduced me to; tales of H. G. Wells and Bradbury.
The aliens are here, my love.
I type out my longing for your skin against mine, for the soft hunger of your kisses in the night. I type the memory of your hands, anchored inside me, as my back arched up off the bed. I type the memory of deep sleep with your body curved in protection around mine, the slow ebb and flow of your breath.
How I long for that now.
They have destroyed everything everyday. Now the unfamiliar, the broken, fills each day. We, the few who’ve survived, in scattered cities, are caught in a fear-filled limbo. Survivor guilt. Sure that we too, will lie down to snatch a few shreds of something once called sleep and not wake again to see the sun. The sun is not something they’ve yet managed to unmake.
Kore Desires 