i. I leave notes around the house, crumpled pieces of paper anchored down by scotch tape. If I were to say anything out loud, anything at all, my throat would strain into a scream and the house would shake and crumble until nothing was left but our bones and the skeleton of my handwriting.

ii. Last night I took all my old CDs outside to the parking lot, sat on the cold concrete and sifted through the discs, setting aside all the ones that made my chest hurt, made me sad, made me nostalgic for who I thought you were and the way things used to be. In the dark, I bent their bodies till they snapped, collecting the shards in the palms of my hands until I lost count of all the corners.

iii. You read my notes with blank eyes and never leave a reply. At night I think I might hear you whispering in your sleep, my ear pressed against our bedroom door shut between us. In the day, we move through the apartment like ghosts on different planes. Nothing I say and nothing you do can get us back onto the same level.

iv. I smoked the last of your weed, watched pale green turn black under the kiss of your lighter found sticky with spilled soda beneath my car seat. Eyelids heavy, I counted how many seconds I had been alive and how many of those seconds were spent loving you. The numbers were higher than I expected and kept rising. It was too overwhelming so I stopped keeping track and laid down on the floor until I melted into the carpet and fell asleep.

v. My pens are running out of ink, but my brain keeps generating questions: why?written over and over until black fades to grey and there are just the indentations of my confusion. If I keep going over the possible causes, retracing each step and my mouth echoing every word I've ever spoken to you, maybe I can find what set off the fracturing between us. Or maybe I'll discover that we were never whole in the first place.

vi. We were never whole in the first place.