I am somewhere on the coast of Washington.

Here, the waves promise to hold me tight and sweet, if only they could climb up that compound of sand and rock. Here, at a tavern so far removed it seems as though it should have gone out of business, people crowd around the bar and the tables and half-devoured slices of pizza. Their hands cradle spirits I, myself, stopped communicating with not too long ago. I’m thinking of you and the things I wish you knew. I’m thinking about how a simple phone call or traverse across time could dissolve years of anguish. I’m thinking of you because you are here and I can’t help but see you and become thrown.

I see you and I remember the day I had nothing to pray to. I was raised in a godless house with loose and hypocritical beliefs, where still I believed there was something far greater than me out there. And so I took it upon myself to forge beliefs of my own. I wonder, is that sacrilege? I know my gods don’t punish me for collapsing them into existence. It seems to me that they are unbothered. I’m so miniscule in their grand ways of knowing that I could be offered as a sacrifice and they would look at my soul in disgust. So useless to them I’d be, they wouldn’t care to know what to do with me. Still, they have a remarkable, golden light that blinds. They have a bewitching sense of humor shrouded in an intoxicating smoke, I sway in a state of self-induced delusion. I learned it’s best to close your eyes and allow yourself to be carried, for you’ll never be able to see, let alone understand, a god when you’re not one.

So when I say I have a god complex, and when I say you soon will too, this is what I mean.

A finger, timid as if it were learning for the first time that it exists, taps my shoulder once and then twice. A woman. Young, I think in your direction, knowing that your obsession with age still lives. I know, as I watch you assess her and her floral dress, that your obsession with age, and how it might have something to say about your dreams, is lesser though still present. I tell you because the girl with the floral dress and the blonde highlights in brown hair looks familiar and I remember seeing the same round, doe-eyed face in the pamphlet for the evening. This woman is the same age as I am now, twenty-seven, and I look back at you, pointedly, as if to say, look at me. Then look at her, timid and barely standing upright. Age knows nothing about dreams.