I spent months watching your icy eyes empty, charting their recession in the shards of your irises. Yes, they were some shattered funhouse mirror, and they will distort me long after they’re cleared away.

As a feeble means of escape, I spent my first day away in a bookstore, trying to find some long-lost map of a body that cannot be comprehended, and therefore cannot be loved. I had quitely hoped to see you there, in amongst the stacks of legends and keys. But all I could find were cheap replicas, simulacra of a you I thought I held. Fragile men with concave faces and thin skin that bowed out over their sturdy teeth. I wrote a letter to one of them and tucked it into the landscape of his distant gaze.

When I finally leave you, it will be a hasty, frustrated escape. I will not ascend to some great heights, or somehow take flight. I will recede silently from view. Your life, your days won’t miss anything. You won’t see the negative space where I used to be. Your broken eyes don’t even see the space I occupy now.

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