Please teach me gently how to breathe.

I couldn't see you until I was standing in your shadow.

I lay in the ambience of the too-soon christmas lights that glowed red inside my head. I surrendered to the buttery warmth of an over-loved mattress. I bit my lip a little harder than planned. I searched for good reasons.

I didn't find any.

But I found a few old thoughts. I found a few kisses left where they shouldn't have been, on shelves alongside mason jars with dead fireflies collected at the bottom. I did not see them die.

"The things a person accumulates."

There were a few letters that I should have written - and perhaps one I shouldn't have. There was a broken christmas ornament and a few cat hairs. And nested on a bed of cotton, from the tops of pill bottles, there was a gold, heart-shaped pendant.

What's greater than the courage it takes to fall into love, is the courage it takes to fall out.

I only ever saw you after sunset. We sat in artificial light, or no light at all. I remember the way our legs touched, and the curve of your spine, leaned against my side of the wall. We moved our hands like we were trying to cover the grave of something we'd secretly buried in the sand that night. The skeleton of a fetus, born far too soon, that didn't make it through the night, breathing the thickest air of promise. The limp body of something that did not live to see a second day. To see a sunrise.

And now, when our eyes meet across a room that is neither yours nor mine, can you feel it like I feel it? A void in the womb created in the space between two bodies, where something silently faded. But we smile. With teeth and everything. And we forget, even for a moment, about the way we buried something that was just you and me on the beach that night.

Does this make us brave?

"The most delicate way cotton candy stains one's fingernails."

He said he'd name his daughter Sophia, and I saw her squeeze his hand.

I burnt my fucking pillow.

He is tanned with dirt. Sitting on a bus with a red suitcase held tightly between his knees. He looks down through long eyelashes, at his remarkably thin thighs, wrapped loosely in black denim. His lips are pursed and in the shadow of a grey moustache that does not match his dark curly hair. He looks nervous, and sits uncomfortably like a young boy in his father's suit jacket, that he worries will never fit quite right. I wonder what he dreams about. And if perhaps his dreams are lots like mine.

I'm shaking like a wet dog trying to dry.

This feels awfully numb.