love, read, write

Morning is a burden for Ezia.

She is heavy, like the weight of a backpack's worn straps on her shoulders.

Ezia is not surprised when she feels Morning pressing against her collarbones softly as she opens her eyes and rubs them. With a small exhale, her eyes float downwards to a half-close, for her feet are still dipped in the echoes of a shadow which had been talking to her in her dreams.

But with time, Morning's palms are more tangible, more distinguished (from pressing to palms to fingers). Soon, she is leaning her weight against the area between the edges of Ezia's collarbones and the sharp of her shoulders.

Ezia swipes Morning away to the ground with a disgruntled push. When she kicks her blankets, Morning's cold breath bites her bare legs in retaliation. Ezia's eyes open slowly (for they are still sticky with the alluring viscosity of her dreams). She pauses, closes her eyes, then opens them again, her eyelashes fluttering as she squints against Morning's bright, curious eyes peering through her window.








"How are you?" The words are spongy in her mouth: tasteless, odorless, and mostly empty.

Comes the equally spongy reply, "I am quite fine. How are you doing?"

"I'm good." Skin touches skin; the apple feels soft in her hand. Mushy. She rolls it. Smooth to wrinkled, folds to curves. She swallows.

Her hair is tied back taut. If she tilts her head forward a little, she can feel her skin (especially near the nape of her neck) tugging on the hair, begging her to return to a dejected, unassuming slump. Her shoulders sag.

Her slippers (flippers, flip flops, shoes, feet-protectors) drag along the tiles as she ducks beneath gazes and greetings and slips into an empty aisle. Crinkle crackle crackers. Instant foods. Glossy wrappers and plastic bags. She touches a bag at eye level and watches as light bounces off of its surface. It crinkles inwards as she pokes its stomach. Lays chips. Original.

"That's a good one, you know."

Ezia turns around. To her left is an old man with wrinkles in his face (like wrinkles in the chip bag but a different kind of wrinkle--this one looks more soft, more real, more understanding but yet somehow more dangerous). His nose scrunches a little before he sniffles, "Kids like those multiflavored shit (he nods towards a "Spicy Hot Nacho Flavor") but I'm tellin you, these are the best." He nods. "Makin a good choice."

Ezia wants to say "a better choice is to eat healthy," but like any other day, Morning has stolen her voice and her thoughts slip past and scurry immediately to the other side of the world. They hide in China, under the arms of a little boy trying to fold his homework into neat fours.

"Yes," she says. She tucks the Lays bag under her arm in her shopping basket. It sits down obediently with a muffled crinkle.








"Why, Ezia," her sister's voice is insufferable. It's nasally, but it hasn't quite gotten the right frequency to fully grate against your insides (which is terrible as well). It's a voice that's kind of in between a husky I just woke up my voice is cracking atrociously, and a high-pitched c'mon tell me teell me what you're thinking because I'm nosy and I want to know everything about your life. Perhaps, Ezia pauses and wonders, the reason her sister's voice is so insufferable is because she has both. An embodiment of both evils.

"Why," her sister repeats, and she drags out the last letter like the way a kindergartner presses on the "y" key out of curiosity, "why, you should go outside a little more. You're like a hermit!" She pronounces hermit like "hirmet" and it makes Ezia want to crawl into a smaller hole.

"I will," Ezia says. Her voice cracks. I wi-ill.

"Wellllllllllllll," her sister's nose says, "you're just saaying that. Anyways." She smacks her lips. "I've got to do the laundry."

Laundry. Ezia looks at her bed. A few days' worth of clothes. It's almost like a concept sculpture, she tries to convince herself. Perhaps if I take a photo of it and send it to the MoMA they'll announce my hidden genius in depicting the horrors of human living.

A true artist.








Frying an egg takes science, art, and skill. It is a careful ratio (perhaps approximately 3:2:4). The amount of oil, the amount of egg, the placing of the egg, the cracking of the egg, the choice of spatula...

Second to hearing raindrops tap their thousands of fingertips against her windows is the sound of an unfertilized chicken egg sizzling on a manmade metal frying pan. Crackle, pop, sizzle. Liquid changes to solid under high temperatures. She watches the edges burn brown. She grips the spatula in her hand.

If her mother had been here, she would have said something like "what are you doing?" and perhaps she would have slapped the spatula out of Ezia's hand and done it herself. Well I'm alone. Ezia watches the egg burn. It burns to a crisp, ugly brown and, patiently, when the time is right, she flips it. The face looks up at her, smiling through nothing. It is a face of charred black, with small holes of lighter brownish yellow. She waits for the other side to burn. It smells horrible. She feels good.








Sometimes Ezia asks herself whether she is really alive. She cuts the egg into small squares and arranges them in a neat, gridlike pattern. She discards the edges. Only square cut-outs. She uses a fork and knife to arrange them quietly. They line up like soldiers, skin charred from working in the sun.

Perhaps this world is just a lie and it is all an act. Perhaps I am the only person who is living thinking she is living a genuine life. Everyone else is an actor. They are hired to make my life as terrible as possible. They are watching my expressions behind the screen. They are waiting for me to cry. They are waiting for me to fall. They are studying the arch of my brows and the curls of my fingers and the the weight on my shoulders. They are waiting for me to realize one day that this is all a fake world. This is all an act. I am being experimented on. They will pull me out and congratulate me and tell me, "congratulations, you've passed the test" once it is all over. Perhaps they will hug me and pat my back and tell me I've been through a lot. Then they will give me a bowl of Lays chips and let me sit in a comfortable chair. A golden retriever will come leaping into my arms. I will name him "Snuff."

Ezia looks at the squares. One of them is out of line. How dare you! She nudges one of its corners. She hears the fingertips tapping against her window, gently, softly. Mother nature is knocking.

She smiles out the window (perhaps the cameras are everywhere). She waves.

"Hello," she says. "I know what this is all about. Please take me out now. I'm ready."

People used to tell me about the man in the moon, but I never really believed them. How could a man be in the moon? Was he the moon? Did the moon eat him? It confused me, logically, and I thought about it much too often for it to pass as a simple lie parents told to placate their children. It drove me nuts—in a benign way, of course—and eventually, I came to a conclusion, in the seclusion of my mind, the silence of my privacy: there was no man in the moon. There was a man on the moon.

It was a small theory I kept to myself—there really was no reason or way to test it out or prove these hundreds of people wrong. I didn’t want to wreak havoc in a world where there were already so many rules to be followed, lines to stay within. I accepted it as my own private truth, apart from everyone else’s. In fact, when my younger sister came along and grew old enough to talk and understand, I found myself telling her not about the truth—the man on the moon—but rather the preferred belief, the man in the moon. Those are the eyes, I would say, and the mouth. It came out of my mouth empty, and it echoed in my mind in utter silence. There was no man in the moon. I knew that.

I held to the belief religiously even after I learned about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins and the fact that, actually, there really was no man in or on the moon—there was just the moon, a natural satellite, ambling around our humble planet like a silent, loyal companion. It was there for our tides, because of our gravity. The moon: another accessory to the sparkling night sky. No life, no man, no story.

But somehow, deep inside, I knew it had to be true. There had to be a man on the moon. It simply did not make sense that there was such a beautiful shape without a man to accompany it. It just had to be.

Years passed and the thoughts subsided, washed ashore and replaced by what people tended to consider as more important things. The man on the moon was much too far away to be relevant, and eventually, it was the last thought in my line of ideas; the one slumping against the wall at the very back, reading his ticket over and over again wondering when the line would shrink and his turn would come up.

For a while, I never thought his turn would come up. Too many predicaments, worries, problems arose that would cut in front of my dear friend, the thought of the man on the moon. Too many things were in the way. And as much as I’ve heard, such is the way of most people.

“Childish dreams stay in the past,” echoed my mother’s voice when I had asked her about the man on the moon at age fourteen. Childish dreams. What was childish? How could it be childish if it could be true?

But one day, an opportunity came over me that I never had before. Had never been offered to any man—and I was sure of it, because otherwise, why was nobody talking about the discovery of the man on the moon? I was the first man to experience this moment—it would be marked down in history:

I met the man on the moon.

I wasn’t too sure how it all happened, nor how it began, but I remember being there and I remember meeting him. One minute, I was driving home, thinking about dinner, and the next, there I was, floating around in nothingness, alone and empty, wondering if maybe a space debris would fly by. Occasionally, one did, but it would skitter past much too quickly for it to be significant. Or sometimes it would brush against my shoulder and I would feel sore for days afterwards. Sometimes it was a particularly important piece of space debris, and I would observe it in awe. But what hit me when I arrived at the moon was the realization that I had been floating in space for quite a long time. Much too long.

When I landed on the moon (in my space suit, of course—nobody moved around without a spacesuit), I was awed by the surface of the ground. Smooth, white, and silky, almost. Completely different than what the textbooks claimed. I sat there, perhaps for a minute, maybe an hour, or maybe a few years, but eventually I looked up because I was not alone. There was a man there.

“Hello,” he said cautiously, his lips moving a bit too slowly, as if I were watching a movie with the audio out of sync. His face was pale, his hair jet black, his clothes quite loose.

“Hello,” I echoed, then noting, “You’re not wearing a space suit.”

“I’m not,” the man agreed. Then he sat down, and I realized that there was a chair for me. I tried to sit, but my space suit was much too big.

“Why don’t you take that off?” His eyebrows raised in concern, “I’m sure it’s been very uncomfortable living like that for so long.”

For some reason, when he said that, tears washed over my face. I realized, indeed, how much unnecessary weight I had been burdening on my shoulders; how many years I had gone through trudging along, thinking I was nothing; how many millennia I had been under the impression that we were all weighed down to the Earth with nothing to do but simply speculate about men on the moon and do nothing else. I had been walking in place for too long.

I took my space suit off, then. I sighed in relief as fresh air bounced off my shoulders (was there air in space? Or perhaps it was my imagination) and I could feel myself much lighter already.

“Who are you?” I asked when I was adjusted to the chair, to the vast, gaping hole around us—black upon black upon black with a dazzling array of sparkling stars splattered across the darkness. “Are you the man on the moon?”

“Indeed I am,” he said, smiling mildly.

“You’ve been here all along?”

“All along.”

“How come people believe that there is a man in the moon and not on it?”

“It’s easier to see,” he said, lifting his shoulders barely visibly in a silent shrug.

I paused, observing his features. His hair was ivory black, a sort of black that was darker than the space around us but still somehow reassuring; his eyes were such an ambiguous shape that I could not tell whether he was from which continent—and eventually I gave up because any which way you wanted him to be, he could become; his clothes were a simple white jacket and black pants.

“Where were you when Neil Armstrong came here?” I said eventually, unable to keep in my curious questions.

“Here,” he answered simply. His eyes were milky soft, his voice smooth.

“They didn’t see you?”

“They didn’t come to see me. They came to see the man in the moon.”

“So there’s a man in the moon, too?”

He lets a long pause slip by before saying, “Maybe.”

“But there’s a man on the moon, that’s you, right?”

He pauses. Doesn’t reply.

“Maybe.”

Silence ensued, stretched out for too long until it was a thin string wrapping itself around my neck. I almost felt like I was going to stop breathing.

“Why don’t we go for a walk?” the man said, noticing my apparent struggle with breathing. I let out a sigh as the air was filled with sound once again.

“Yes,” I agreed. “A walk.”

We walked for a little, and I observed the crevices along the ground as he trudged forward. Our footsteps of careful crackles against the grainy ground decorated the silence.

At last we arrived at an edge—for apparently, there was an edge on the moon, and he sat down. Pulled out a fishing pole. Looked up at me expectantly. So I sat down beside him.

“Do you fish?” the man asked.

“Occasionally,” I replied. “With my family, sometimes. I’m not too good, though,” I said.

He nodded, silently attaching a small piece of bread to the hook. “Watch.”

As he threw the bait out, I watched the fishing line graciously dance out into the infinities of the universe. The line would never end. It went down and down and down and down until I looked down and my head hurt because I couldn’t possibly take in all of the information below us. There were no barriers—I could see straight down to infinity.

“Don’t look too far,” he said quietly, “it might hurt your eyes.”

I nodded, then looked to him. He was looking at his fishing pole.

“Do you catch fish here?”

“Fish?” he asked. He chuckled. “No, not fish.” The fishing pole began to squirm. We waited as he reeled it in, perhaps for a few years, maybe. I watched his patience.

Soon the hook appeared and I saw that there was no bread on the hook anymore.

“You didn’t catch anything,” I observed.

“No,” he said. He took something off of the hook, a faint glow. “A star.”

“That can’t be a star,” I said immediately, but something came over me, something like embarrassment or perhaps shame. “Or can it?” I added.

He didn’t reply, just cradled the light until it shone a little brighter, until it began to flicker like a shy flame.

“Some claim stars their own and attach their dreams to it,” the man said simply. He turned to me, then. Gave the star. I held it in my hands. It was lukewarm, tickling against my skin. I could feel it squirming.

“Thank you,” I said cordially. I didn’t know what to do with it.

The man watched me, observing my emotions. I felt uncomfortable with his eyes so intently fixed on me, but I chose to focus on the star. It was warm, a dull yellow, the size of two fists. It had a very faint glow, but a distinct power. We stayed like that for quite a while.

“I think it’s time for you to go now,” he said eventually, and I nodded. He was right.

“Good bye,” I said, turning to my left. But he was gone.

This is the most I can recall from my visit that day (or night, perhaps—or year). It was all too confusing—I had met the man in the moon, but then, I wasn’t so sure. It was too disjointed, everything was, too muddled in some fogged atmosphere. I woke up the following morning in a bed—my bed? A bed?—and there were people waiting for me. I was on Earth again. My heart sunk.

“You’re back!” they said in unison. Water lined their eyes.

“I’m back!” I replied. Water lined mine.

“We thought you were gone forever!”

“I met the man on the moon!”

They smiled, then. They didn’t hear me. Of course. They had never aimed for the man on the moon. They gave me tea, blankets, hugs, smiles, tears. All the while I told them about the man on the moon and they petted my hair, hugging me tight, saying, yes, yes, of course you did, of course you did, but now you’re here now, you’re safe, hush, hush, it’s okay, it’s okay. Everything’s back to normal now. I didn’t know what to say. I just sat and listened.

I looked up that night and saw the moon hanging in the night sky, full to the brim, displaying the man in the moon.

“So you met the man in the moon?” one little girl asked me, maybe seven or eight years old. Perhaps she was my younger sister from twenty years ago. Perhaps she was my daughter. Perhaps she was my granddaughter. I couldn’t tell. I was too lost in the sea of time, too unsure of where to place myself. But that didn’t change the answer.

“No,” I found myself saying softly. “There is a man on the moon. And I met him. Yesterday.”