I wonder, with my body and your body and so many other bodies on this planet, how much we break the body of space that surrounds us daily. I think about the way we exchange the air we breathe with the abounding atmosphere in our inhales and exhales, how they pollute the rising horizons and the fading paper-mâché fantasies with equally paper-mâché people. Just two days ago at the diner I used to often visit, a girl wearing a green crocheted beanie with coffee stains on her flower dress tells me about this truth she always believed, the fact that we slowly break our own bodies as we break the body of this world in which we live. As she speaks, the intruding sunset bleeds into the breaches of the diner windows, and I feel my body exposed to the begging touch of nature itself. I ask if she feels the warmth receding beyond the tangible. She argues that warmth is a relationship between the prominence of the sun’s ignitions and the watchful, hidden guard of the silent moonlight glow. Eventually, we are left in the company of shadows dancing to the beating of silence residing between us. I utter the word brokenness as if it were an anthem, bottling the absence of sound only to shatter it on the surface of the uncrowded wooden table. The girl whistles softly before inquiring about my opinion on such a topic. I tell her brokenness mirrors warmth in its nature, how it is a relationship between the absence of pursuing restoration and the attraction hauling us toward crashed skies containing smoke-body desires. She smiles faintly as we leave the artificial, dirty-pink fluorescence leaking into the barren parking lot. I take one last look at her before she disappears into her scarlet Volvo, traces of her green crocheted beanie blending into the forest background of conifer trees basking under late night whispers. -J.P Legarte