Story

I didn’t call, because I talked to you so much more once you were gone. I sat in a folding chair behind my parents’ house looking at a winterbare cornfield and reminiscing with you about the time in Thailand when our little stream flooded up the stilts over the porch up to the lip of the doorway. We went back to the cabin in Mindo. We tried to figure out why we’d fought, how we could make up, when I could come back to you. What kind of job I should look for. What toppings I should order on my pizza. How everything is always trying to dissolve into nothing. In the mornings I said good morning, at night, goodnight. I apologized for everything I’d done, and you graciously accepted. You said you were sorry.

I assume you moved in with your boyfriend, or he with you. I don’t think you thought about me. So I invented a new you, one who belonged only to me, and I lived with her. We fought, a lot, and I screamed at you for hours, but she never left, and I could never leave her. And over the months we mellowed and became calm, dull as loneliness, polishing our story.