I had a darling friend once, sweet as the summer sun with a voice like a grass waving breeze, back when I was young enough to be new to love but old enough to know its ache; and we’d go to the beach often. Drive down to the coast on a bordering lukewarm day, and I would watch the wind sweep her hair like my fingers did in my dreams, spend the afternoon blaming my damning blushed on sunburn and waves. We’d cook like dogs before we began to sizzle and went to hide beneath towels as if we were pulling a blanket over the sky, our breath hot, her upper lip dotted with fat beads of sweat and I’d swallow down the urge to lick them off in a line.

Outside the damp cover, we’d hear the flap of those too thin chickens, white feathered rats with wings and cats eyes. My summer sweet would hiss and wave, chilling the air with her unwelcoming, and I would stare. Her arms were pale as the cotton cloud color of the seagulls wings, and perhaps it was because they flew so high at times that they took the clouds with them. They swooped in low and fast, more bullet than body when the waves crashed, rough against each other in the art of dark saltwater Sumo, and in the airy stands the seabirds, spectating, stealing the froth and foam straight from the mouth of the monster. She thought them stupid. She thought them selfish and greedy and horrible scavengers that ought to be picked off from the planet like the last scrape of sinew from bone. But though she was so dear to me, I could not find it in my summer filled heart to agree.

For I too was a cat eyed thing, drinking in her image like a man lost at sea when the light danced between the linens and if only she knew. I wished for this thin, hungry form to stop starving for her, too cowardly to reach and feed that hungry nest. No, this cowardice of mine had survived off scraps and eggshells alone. But if I had been a seagull. If I had been born breathless and brave, fearless from flight, then I too would have made a bullet of my body to reach her. To lick the foaming spraying of her sweat from her skin, and take the apple-slice cut of her lips between my yellowed teeth, against my beakish mouth. I’d have picked her apart until she was bruised, properly scavenged. If I had been brave enough to be a seagull, tether of my heart, I would have finally been fed.