Say your brain is a beach now. I dig into the cracks and low-tide puddles, through over-worn, sea-smoothed holes, looking for the best ones: tiger-striped turkey wings, a curved fragment of conch, handful of olives. Cockles ruffled so you can almost taste the artificial cheese coating a compacted potato. Shelling is hungry business. I miss the columbine that grew out of the cracks in the front steps of your house, early days. Star of five little knife petals alternating with five trumpet bells that I'd pluck off, snap the sweet bubble-end between my teeth. I could pluck and bite all five and it would still look like a flower. I could bite off every columbine top in the bunch and still leave a purple constellation. Do you ever do this? But ocean food is the opposite of those honey-pockets, which are completely insubstantial but so so so satisfying. I could probably take a real bite of a sea lettuce and fill my belly, but could I stand the flavor? I pinch a swollen rockweed frond between my teeth and a salty snap squirts mostly out. I won't try another one. I could leave the low-tide pool, return to the steps on the hill of a sunny day. There is just as much imagery for me to collect here but the scene will be equally inaccessible to you. What is turkey wing to you? A crisped piece of flesh to be served under cranberry sauce? Can you taste the salt yet? The oil? Does it taste like the rockweed? I know you can't. What is columbine to you? Not a constellation of flowers, but the first tragedy? Does it sound like screams or silence? Do you know what silence sounds like? Lucky, you can’t imagine either. I stay on the beach though, this metaphor more direct. I imagine that my fingers tracing the paths in the imbedded brain coral will be easier for you to picture, in the same non-way that drugstore readers might help the blind. But this brain does look like your brain, and the olives like olives. Maybe if you look at an olive now, you'll understand. Go get a handful of olives. Good. Find a young woman and give her the olives. The woman is me and the olives are olives, but they are also attention. Write "attention" on each olive. You hold on to the jar. Don't give her as many olives as you thought you were going to when you heard the phrase "a handful of olives." Underestimate the size of her hands and their olive capacity. Is this easier? No? Try turkey wings. Get two halves of the same clam. Label one "emotionally unavailable" and the other "aphantasia." Now mix them up, play the shell game, watch the woman who is me lose track of the difference. Know that they are not connected, just two parts of the same clam. You're the clam. I guess it's not your fault if you didn't picture yourself as the clam. You're also the beach and the front steps. The rocks, olives, brain coral, stars, screams, honey-pocket. You're all the shells but you're high-tide too. Maybe it's better if you can't picture it. I don't think they even have a beach in Denver, and there aren't any shells on the front steps. So I’ll skip pictures and just use words. I was trying to say that I thought I knew some things about you. For example: That you like olives. And now I think that I am wrong.