A door that opens inwards.

Somewhere in your eyes I can tell you are looking for something meaningful to say to me – I try to step around it – you note it and frown. Usually, I am quite good with sincerity, but for four nights you did what you could to keep me together while I slept, all the while awake thinking of ways to leave me. In the embarrassment of my realisation, I am unable to face my grief with anything but contempt. For you, I am fiction. I am bracing for you to tell me that. In your explanation of how things ended you struggle to remember my name, the colour of my hair, the words I used to repeat. In an argument you point a finger at me, quoting a time when I told you I hated a song you loved – in my head I’m trying place its rhythm, but it doesn’t seem to catch on. In viper tongue I spit ‘narcissist’ - why do you even care about these things. Isn’t it hard to hate something you don’t know? I follow your script: how could you do this to me, what did I do to deserve this, why couldn’t we have talked about this. I get comfortable in my role of heartbreak, and you take causality to my accusations out of mercy. Lacking the ability to fumble some comforting words I am astonished by your silence. In your bedroom, your sheets navy blue – you sit dumb. I go to slam your door, but before I can leave you for good, I opened it inwards and caught a glimpse of you floating – your body suspended between the bed and the ceiling.

My ability to write fiction has long been lost. I’ve gotten too old. Trying to imagine a world beyond my own has become impossible when it demands so much of my attention and speculation, of which I only have so much. The headlines read “GLOBAL PEACE REACHES AN ALL TIME LOW”. I wonder how long it will take before we call it a World War, or how long before historians look upon the wake of our destruction and argue over the reasons why no one ever thought to name it something catchier. While we keep ourselves busy re-inventing language, the process of losing you accelerates. I am losing you (curled up on the couch) and I have lost you what seems like a thousand times a day (I scroll through the news on my phone), I experience, deny, and process it all in minute cycles that never end. Sometimes I get a good laugh in, but once the air runs out, I gasp for the time when I remembered you and me (I see the death toll rise). This is the urgency of grief – I lose its details; I don’t know who to call. Some things just never cross your mind again.

Not so long ago, the sun cast this pattern on our shoulders (side by side) like a new limb between us, I remember I could move through this light and feel you move with me. There are these big moments – where you were soft and kind and, in my mind, you rewrote those two words forever. Beyond that, my memory is somewhat amputated. I recall in lengthy quotation from the dictionary, the bible – even Marx, when asked to explain the mystery of your detachment. I don’t bring up what I saw that night, I imagine my knowledge of it was not intended and so out of respect I had removed it from the narrative. This was not the first time I had noticed something about you was different. You used to glow with this bright warm light – it was kind of abstract and otherworldly, it wouldn’t reflect on the things around you, but it would hang around your body in the mirror. When I imagined you (your platonic ideal), I imagined this light tense, like a beautifully wrapped veil - and you, desperately fighting to break through it. You denied its existence vehemently but would turn red at its mention, responding with a splutter of stringed up words that would usually end in our mutual silence. Like the sound of cars or a phone buzzing in a pocket, it had become normal, just another one of those things you never wanted to talk about. I stopped looking for it in your reflection and complaining how it would keep me up at night, that on the day you stopped glowing altogether, I was already blind.

Perhaps by now there are many things I have forgotten. It is the exact shape of your nose or the name of the island I imagined us one day retiring to. Maybe, in the clumsiness of my record keeping, I have forgotten you can fly or shapeshift or (one time someone was kind to me, and they looked like you) multiply. Selfishly, I once thought you had glowed for me and in earnest I used to appeal for that answer, but I soon found silence was your greatest superpower, it was of the most unnatural kind. Flawed in my own journalistic intent, our lives together are in fragments of peaks and newsworthy bites. ‘FLOATING MAN SPOTTED FLYING ACROSS USA BORDER’ and other such conspiracy will inform me of your whereabouts long after things have ended. What happened to you after I closed that door I don’t know; my only map has no promise of expansion, and I am within their limits. Isn’t it hard to hate someone you don’t know? Or to remember the space where a door swings open, what part of the floor belongs to one room or the other? The monumental task of figuring out what part of you (or me) has truth after some time for forgetting.