I’m 20 something, It’s april something, and something is coming up about this a sour note, an abrupt ending, a last rung -- we move against all of it like a tide. Iit’s over, babe. and the whole world knows but us. So we kiss and we keep busy we go to therapy and try date night, we read the books people read when they can no longer hear the music we journal, we vacation, we cry on the floor. you vomit in the bathroom, I clean the bathroom, we move into a new apartment, we decorate, we fantasize, we drift through the new grocery store looking for the person we fell in love with in the old grocery store. You drink too much, I go to early yoga You work late, I get strict about my bedtime we are drawing lines in sand we can no longer see We open the windows, we run out of windows we promise to change, we don’t. We promise we love each other, we don’t act that way We keep decorating. We go back to Ikea. I see your phone and we don’t really bounce back from that because every time I look at you, I see his teeth, I hear his name I hate that he has a name a job, a desk I wonder how awful must the baby be before I can throw her out with the bath How cold must the water become before I Step out of the tub entirely We redecorate, we move furniture Trying to fit our outlines against the closing walls We sit at the tiny table, I think you reach your hand across the solid grain But it’s not your hand, it’s a letter you wrote him, or maybe it’s his hand Closing a circuit around your waist like a corroded battery and with that image, in that instant, love undecorates the whole house like a bad dog Posters slide from the wall, the couch unravels like a crime scene, The candle wax climbs up the wick, burns and then disappears entirely and with it the promise of our sacred autumn, our shared holiday, our steeple brushed with snow, That streetlight on Maspeth Avenue that once called our skeletons to safe supper that first winter. Supper disappears as we puzzle our bodies apart in the half light someone uncooks rice, butter hardens over now dry kernels in the still metal kitchen you sketch white over a mountain pass in your notebook I step out of bed into what’s left of the mountains. The page goes white behind me.