Sometimes, when I try to sleep I don’t know where to rest my tongue. I don’t know where to tuck it so it won’t be chomped in pieces or chewed on the sides like I sometimes do in my waking stress. Sometimes I worry it is too far back, it is possibly blocking my airway, my breath is getting shallow. In the same moment, too far forward, undoing years of orthodontics, pushing my front teeth aside and reforming the gap my seven-year-old tongue would force water through, squirting it away in an exhilarating stream. You can never relax your tongue, but I wish I didn’t know that. The not relaxing is more painful now that I do know, and I’m worried you will feel the same now that I’ve told you of the non-neutrality of that strange organ behind and between your teeth.

         I walked to a field last night. I had no desire to walk, only that the sun had flouted the socked-in nature of the last weeks and finally illuminated the space between my blinds, projecting this striped absence on the wall, bathing it in warmth. I had no desire to walk, ankle ached, head thudded. My heart was not in my throat, but it might have been in my elbows tucked close to my center. It is in the nature of a sunspot like that situated against a week like that to demand something of its viewers, and this sunset demanded to be felt more than viewed. And so I walked to the field to feel the sunset, to close my eyes against it, to watch the clouds in the way my dad had instructed me to watch shooting stars. “I don’t know what it means and I don’t care because it’s Shakespeare and it’s like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words,” Frank McCourt wrote in his memoir. I was trying to hold this particular sunset in my mouth, to roll it around and melt it on my tongue.

         Let me tell you what it feels like to catch a sunset, a snowflake in time, on your tongue: Unfocused wisps, wind-carried, lash-framed, red sky at night sailor’s delight red sky at morning sailor take warning, maybe the clouds are moving but maybe actually I’m moving against them, maybe it’s all coming to a slow stop, all unfolding against Steinbeck’s “hour of the pearl,” time turning to look over its shoulder, Blue blue.

         Sometimes, my earlobes whisper to my ears that I will never exist in comfortable space and that time is hurtling linearly towards the certain destruction of either a personal or a cosmic world. If uprooted, I wonder whether I would turn mulch-swath-circles vertical around me, or if instead I could be plucked, slid from soil with the ease of a maple sapling. I watch the sunset and think of the fact that humans have watched sunsets since before they could be classified as humans. Later, I fall asleep to podcasts on poetry and an audiobook of Cannery Row, the nineteen-year-old’s lullaby. Maybe this is the primal comfort of drifting off to fire-side conversation, of knowing that even in sleep you exist with and amongst and that you are actually not very separate at all.

         Crescent moons, twenty of them, gently wane against carpet blue, dusk blue, bathmat. A crescent moon from each of my fingers and toes, this habit of personal maintenance has left me with twenty horizons and each with their own moon. Floss wound thrice ‘round index fingers, reaching for molars, another habit of personal maintenance. This one continues until two fingertips are blue. They are blue in this vernacular which views that which is usually red-ish and is not, in this moment, red-ish enough as being blue. It is thought to be too blue relative to its healthy state. Which is to say that my friend’s fingertips are too blue for her body, and this is what she enjoys about flossing.

         I trim my fingernails and I trim my toenails and I make two fingertips too blue for my red-ish body as I reach for the residue trapped between molars. An earbud delivers my nightly human murmurings, and I think of my tongue behind and between my teeth. The timeline stretches and morphs. This line, it turns upward on one end as my earbud vibrates the troubling earlobe. It turns upward on the other end too, and it is not a line at all. It is placed gently amongst the stars, and I am placed in my bed. My tongue is placed at rest because I am not thinking about it, and this crescent which I had briefly misinterpreted as a line is but one of multiple moons, of many sunsets.