Q

January 2016

There are some losses you cannot prepare for. Before realizing this, I spent the year rehearsing a grief. You were still here. Your elbow wedged below my rib, my hands anchored along your jaw, our faces so close only the crescent of a single eye was in focus. I would imagine sorrow in all its shades: the salty, gritty twisting of guts and hot, dizzying tears; my lungs practiced emptying themselves. Half-heartedly I bat at the teasing hope lodged vaguely between us (you might stay, you might stay).

I guess it is easier to imagine something than nothing, which was what remained. Where you were, a blank length – a reluctant marathon I did not want to start. I did not cry because there was no one to cry to. There was no elbow to prompt a tangible pain, no cheek to press against my palm as blueprint to navigate loss. My tongue became sandpaper, rasp with unanticipated silence.

Ceteris paribus, you once said as a punchline to a joke I cannot remember (except that you told it with a lilting grin and expectant eyes). Perhaps that is the hardest part of all: that all else remains constant. I remember you in everything else left behind. Once, I caught myself turning to where you would have been, your name hitched right at the base of my throat, hastily swallowed, embarrassed for no one.

A year ago you would have stirred and – half-awake – pulled me in, away from my careful plans of being alone, leaving them crumpled and frivolous. Now I stand gaping, the shape of your name still tingling against my paper-thin lungs like an unfinished arc of a question mark