I learnt about potential and parallels on Twitter today –

This is the kind of thing I think I might whisper to you in the event of another

sleepover turned

perennial summer.

In the parallel universe, time doesn’t necessarily

            run

any differently than it does now.

(I mean, it’s not like

there’s a world with another me, you,

us after a long stretch of an afternoon /

ducking through sprinklers crinkling our noses at the boar water hitting our shins collapsing

reviving ourselves only to execute high level operations,

pouring warm flat Sunkist into plastic

cups passed down the side of a bunk bed in the half

dark,

our laughter soaking through both mattresses –

No small talk between siblings just

this.)

I can’t quite explain it so well, but I remember

something about meteors

            exiting

the sky. Imagine a whole           universe           where meteors

gather themselves at the throat

leaning against the doorframe departure gates and

            go

quietly.

Not a ‘what if’ universe, 
(Like what if I waved my arms hard enough that I gathered the wind in the crooks of my

elbows and became a bird or something half winged

 and I was up there, with you,

in the clouds and you looked out your window and you saw me and the ruckus was so great

that the whole plane landed, and I landed and we went home and we laughed about it all,

together.)

(I mean it’s not like there’s a world with another youmeus.)

 (I mean that, that’s something unimaginable, isn’t it?)

(I think you’d laugh here. I often imagine you the other half of all my rambling –  Do you do

the same? Are you also flossing over that summer? Each crack of a new can a half cough,

half snicker during prayer? Is it so unimaginable that you’re thinking of me too?) 
just meteors

reverse blinking out of the sky, ceasing to be. I mean

can you imagine? What it would look like? All that

light, all that smouldering

            without fuss?
I think to tell you this months later as I pat gently at a drying shadow

            desperately clinging to a single bed. 
And the east coast isn’t that far from here but it’s far enough,

sweet boy

and you are just

a boy

in this poem.

If there exists a distance far enough between us

that I can no longer hold you through this phone,

then know that I am so far beyond it I’m already right back next to you.

Know that I’ll weather the dissonance time and time again –

Know that i’m trying.

If there is a universe in which I am no longer your little sister,

I hope it collapses into itself.

I hope it burns.

I hope we wish from our platform of sibling cosmic nothingness to find our way back to each other –

Sweet boy,

I’m on my way, I promise.

So help me God, I will open these borders with my bare hands)