Hippocampus Rift

"I bet your shirt will shrink in the wash"
was the first thing to cross my mind.

All 100% of that cotton under my palms was what I was aware of the most.


The brain shuts off certain sensations and focuses specifically on certain others at one time.
It's an intentional mechanism, built in ingeniously to avoid an otherwise overwhelming flooding of the senses that would prevent us from functioning.


Perhaps that's what my brain was doing,
shutting off the sound of the trees that rustled in the pre-summer atmosphere, the feel of those airy tendrils that swept around my shins.

Perhaps it was just trying to shut out the feeling of fingers in my tangled hair that were not my own, trying to shut out the sense of gripping familiarity that locked me in its arms

while the scent of a warm front and trees and rum and laundry detergent filled my lungs and threatened to drown me


so that all I did sense were the soft, white threads
of a stranger's cotton shirt against a blurry darkness.