socially awkward.

You let your eyes wander while you hold your body still. Your sight takes you to the end of the cliff, but here you are without him, him who is ready to jump. He calls for you but you pretend that you are deaf. I can’t hear you, you try to say; the silence has blanketed the airwaves and it has made your words loose. The smell of cigarette smoke is still there. The taste of his tears are still warm on your tongue. He still calls for you. You, you remain still.

At once, the cliff turns to a train, and the deserted expanse of land has become a platform. He has brought all your clothes, he’s packed them all for you. You scour the inside of your pockets and find a folded paper and a ticket that is supposed to take you to a city you have never heard of. In the paper is an illegible print of your name, only your name. You imagine a life with him, and then imagine a life without him. You weigh both imaginations. The train has left, and you are still standing on a platform which does not contain him anymore.

You remember the first day you have met him, and suddenly, the train station has turned into the place where you have seen him that day in May. You smell the air, remember the air, it’s the very air you both have shared. You must have breathed too much oxygen that came from his exhales. You have fallen in love, instantly, as if all it took was the split-second closing of the shutter of his camera. His eyes were indigo. Through the lens of his camera, his eyes turned pale blue. He is so close, and you are so afraid of his electric skin, and suddenly he touches you, and you die, and you find yourself in a cliff. You find yourself in a cliff, and he’s waiting for you to jump with him, but you tell him,

I’m already dead, I’m already dead.

1. You were like the ocean, when I once thought I was a river. No matter where the current of my water streamed, the path always led back to you.

Of course, I was wrong. You were no ocean.

You were just a single teardrop that trickled down my left eye. Within a mere half-minute, you were gone.

2. We used to anticipate days that began with the sight of each other’s faces.

You are so beautiful when you sleep.

(The sheets beside me are empty. I find them more beautiful that way.)

You are so beautiful in my dreams.

(Before I close my eyes and surrender to sleep, I think of nothing. Now, I only wake up from an elapsed blankness.)

3. I always sang to the moon, hoping it could illuminate your features enough to let me see you even from a distance.

You left, yet the moon is still up there gleaming every evening of our lives apart.

I have already forgotten the words to my song.

It is a lesson in gravity, or the sudden seeming absence of it, whenever he is close to me.

I

float, always.

It is also a lesson in anatomy, the oddness of such phenomenon: how I experience flight, when I am not even a bird, when I am but a human incapable of growing out a wing from the margin of my spine.

I

take

flight, anyways.

He is a spectacular subject matter in the study of physics — the theory of relativity, the relativity of time and space. With him, the entire idea of a plane of time cross-hatched with a plane of space suddenly vanishes from each of their absurd existence. A mile is not a mile when the molecules of his sweat are intact on the premises of my skin.

What distance? What shortage of a day’s length?

We

are

always

together, anyways.

Here is a simple act of disappearance: the dying flicker of a flame atop a melting white candle. It is the only illumination from the dark, unlit room. When it dies, the act of disappearance is complete. It takes two minutes and thirty-three seconds for it to vanish into the blanket of the cold evening air.

It also takes two minutes and thirty-three seconds to walk away from my bedroom, to the door leading towards the staircase, which leads to the bottom floor of this apartment, and towards the exit that leads to the street walkways. Here is another act of disappearance: in the middle of the night, you in your nightdress, leaving. The present hour of the night is as quiet as an empty theater, and your footsteps are precise like a ballerina’s tiptoeing.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel as if I am a dismantled candle which has lost its sine qua non: the tiny dancing ember, you.

We lay still, listening to the music of our breathing, slightly amused by the fact that respiration was in itself a valued performance, with oxygen as our choice of instrument.

You said that if we align our anatomies we can perfectly craft a constellation together. I said that every cell that makes you up was like a star, housed in the galaxies of your skin.

I’ve always known there were stories untold hidden under your tongue. They have always tasted of saltwater and burnt apples. I’d like to think you have always loved the sea.

Maybe someday, you’ll be able to grow wings secured by your backbone, and finally be able to swim through the skies. At night, you might smell like clouds and a hint of rain.