passing
    3:42 a.m.

She checks me regularly. I see her face in my memory and feel her eyes looking in, wrapping loving arms around my words as if she never left, as if she's always been here, as if we've never been apart, as if I've always known. Alone, I forget. Call it aging or apathy, sorrow or defenses, moving on, but it is not moving on, never moving on, not really. It is fatigue, partly, tiring of the wait, tiring of the pain that filled the empty spaces where love used to bloom. It is frustration, mostly, endless angsty ruminating over what could have been, should have been, would have been if I had not made that one lst mistake, if I had only turned left instead of right, if I had not retaliated, if I just maintained my composure one more day, one more hour, one more moment.

And in these moments I remember those moments, the laughter, the tears, the tearing sound of a heart silently ripped from a chest by bonds that will not break. Disbelief pours from eyes too old to see the youth slipping, as the grip on hope fails, just out of reach. Vision replaced by an abyss of endless nothingness, redundant repetition, ruminating again, and again, and again on the meaning of the word gone. Everything appears gone, detached, left behind or passing by.

A wry cough awakens me with the words growing up, but nothing starts, not even the energy to shudder or flinch or yawn. Lost, I motion through each day as nights, hiding in the silent paperwork that fills my cubicle, mastering the casual glance and plastic smile that keeps others at bay, others passing through the outer limits of consciousness with their own stories, their own frustrations, fatigue, and invisible walls, moving on. How do we all get so good at moving on.

I know she checks me regularly. I see her IP address in my stats. If is somehow comforting to know that she is still curious, that she still wants to know, that she still, in her own way and time, cares.