You hurt me like an old wound, and you do not heal. You are still in me… I forget you. And then I repeat to myself in my mind our last good day. I usually look for you before I go to bed. I cannot find you. The weather is silent. The night grabs me—dark and another, in which only the memory is bitter. Days and months pass, years slide, your voice echoes in the silence. It is unlikely that this pain will pass. Or maybe I don't want to leave it... How I want to wake up one day, —no memories of anything, no guilt, to erase you and to lose you in the last embrace of sleep.
# Leaving You Asleep I leave you asleep in the morning, your face turned toward the wall, one arm flung across the pillow as if reaching for something just beyond the edge of dreaming. The light comes slant through the window— that particular gold of early hours when the world still believes in itself, when nothing has yet demanded its pound of flesh. I dress quietly. Each button a small conspiracy with silence. The floorboards know my weight but keep their counsel. You don't stir. Your breathing holds its own rhythm, separate from mine, and I think how we are always leaving each other this way— not in anger or coldness, but in the simple arithmetic of days, in the necessary departures that keep us ourselves. The door closes soft as a thought. Outside, the city wakes its machinery. But for one moment longer I hold the image of you— sealed in that small room, in that small peace, in a world I have left behind the way one leaves a lit candle in an empty chapel.
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