Aaron M. Fortkamp

Little boy, come to me quickly. This has been an interminable wait. My arms ache to hold you. You fade in and out of reality to me. In some moments you have a face, a personality, a name. In others I am cold and alone and my embrace finds nothing but blankets and repetition.  

I imagine you Scottish and moody, clinging to that which makes you feel, running at breakneck speed down hills into lush fields after grasshoppers, laughing, the next moment your faced gnarled up and glowering at the turn of a shadow. I want to breathe life into your bones, and look into your eyes, and press you forehead to forehead, come to me now. 

Someone’s going to break your heart one day. 

My favorite thing is to not exist. I want to tell you how. If you can pick up a guitar. If you can learn how to type, or paint. If you can sing and become nothing but a voice. If you can climb a tree and become the wind. Put on your favorite shades and sit on a bench in a theme park and watch families traipse past in the middle of their own troubles, their tiny bubbles of dropped water bottles and hunger and tickets and trinkets and sweat and blisters and gluttony and giggles and farce, and you are there with them, next to them, a part of them, until they are out of earshot and eyeshot and persist only in your mind. 

I would that you take the best of me. I am impressive, on my best days. A wallflower at my worst, and that’s not all that bad a thing. 

Your mother has you now, tucked safely inside. Tomorrow you will ride a boat maybe and not even know it. She will smell the ocean and you will smell the fluid imbued with the scent of the ocean and her breakfast and your own offal and the combination will formulate a certain chemistry in your brain that you’ll never be rid of. I would apologize for it but when you’re my age you wouldn’t change a milliliter of it. So you’re welcome, I suppose.  

Can I tell you about boats. About water displacement and Archimedes and the buoyancy of fat. I want to tell you easy to digest falsities about how most of your body heat dissipates from your head, only to tell you later in life this was just a scam to get you to wear a toboggan. I want to raise you far away from nowhere, which itself is far away from anyplace else, a woods, a mountain, a wooded moutain where you will be alone with me and your mother and our dogs and the broken sky and the shakey pines and the mountain lions and rabid curious raccoons and you will be safe, invisible in the void. I can’t protect you forever, but I will try my best. 

Let’s go to Alaska. Let’s go to Siberia where we don’t speak the language and we can learn to live together, after all I don’t really know a thing, I am just an uncut wound yet to bleed. I will bundle you in swaddles and swaddle you in bundles and we’ll slay an elk and disembowel it so I can tuck you inside to last the night. Yes that’s right I would kill for you, I would make shelter from the most innocent of things just to shield you from undue sun. I will carry you until my arms fall off. 

I hope you feel safe in sleep. I want to grant you an affection for the subconscious existence as early as possible. I don’t know if it’s possible to nurture a true waking passion until your nightself has access to God. I will give it to you. I will make you know you’re protected, that in dreams you are free to explore, that nothing can hurt you, that in dreams you aren’t even you, but a ghostly voyeur, unbound, encouraged, armored, brave, insightful, kind, capable, and most of all a font of resilient passion, unencumbered by pain, by fate, by loss, by love, by the most common or rare of human faults.  I want you to know in dreams that the guidance of your heart cannot lead you astray, that should you be tugged chestward into volcanoes or hurricanes that at least with your eyes closed you will always be reborn, so that when you follow these same paths in waking life and the future seems uncertain and you are at your lowest you might remember the lessons of your inner sanctum, and follow them, to death or to life beyond.

I want to have a pizza with you. Because pizza might be the greatest thing there is.