Aarik Danielsen
Both Ends of I-29 Are Always Touching
That beady-eyed, four-lettered billionaire pays a lark’s sum for my favorite social medium. So I turn up my jacket, scuff my shoes over to Instagram with an agnostic’s interest.
There, trying my best, I revel to share a Magritte painting, remind myself some lights never go out. There, you glide through my DMs with the best art criticism, cast your own floodlight on every unloved inch of me.
We flirt and volley, uncover ourselves, share secret smiles. You twist the plots of treasured dreams, then sow and harvest fresh visions. Two days after Thanksgiving, you come from Omaha, cleave the falling snow, and fuck me in a fashion that revises both our lives.
Someday and somewhere else, a firework cracks the sky into colors, spurs some Midwestern kid’s dream of getting the hell out. A starved painter sifts the clearance aisle, sighing to take a bruised burgundy while their friend paints barns blazing red. Glaring lights frame a boot store as big as an acre while, across the interstate, the old farmer’s kitchen light flickers.
Saturday night comes and someone’s favorite band loads in on another coast, leaves them home with pages of liner notes, alone with a wild imagination. Weeks after signing his name, a bureaucrat falls asleep as the big trucks roll; one lane closes, makes me later coming home, steals something like three kisses from me and you.
See, the rain always falls some place before the other. A copse of trees is planted to break the gale; sharing soil, each shifts to suit this perpetual presence—and to be loved. Everything touches everything, and nothing happens without some handwritten cosmic notice.
Spend a fortune on some bullshit whim and I’ll make my money back:
in sex and grand gestures, singed dreams and made-up kisses, a payout nobody but us will remember but somehow everybody knows.
Aarik Danielsen is a writer and longtime arts journalist. His debut collection of night essays will be published by Cornerstone Press in summer 2027. His work appears in Pleiades, Tupelo Quarterly, Image Journal, Split Lip and more. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his partner, the writer Holly Pelesky.
