Sat on your floor and twisting fragments of paper round my fingers; you’d written questions on them and emptied them into a jam jar. We’d met two days ago. Your dog was missing, had sunk its teeth into the dirt and taken with the wind. You weren’t worried. You didn’t know me well enough to let concern seep onto the carpet between us. I didn’t know you well enough to see it etched across your face. She came back the next day anyway. 

You made me coffee and I struggled with the overwhelming urge to apologise for every gesture that I couldn’t meet with a counterpart. You were busy picking up pieces of yourself from the kitchen floor while running over your five year plan. And it wasn’t long until you blurred from a person into a feeling, as those we love often do -  something tender and mellow. A borrowed duvet, braided threads round a wrist, something to hold. I feel you’d be better described with colours and hues, I see the appeal of craftsmanship in a world that we still haven’t found the words to satiate. You were so kind to me - I hope I managed to return some of that. I’m not sure if I did - I was too busy scanning rooms and conversational lilts. But everything about your existence made me feel safe. 

Love tends to run through my hands, I am more acquainted with her absence even though I comb my memories for hints of hearts reaching in my direction. In some ways it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, unavoidable when all is considered. I want to ask you if you still love me, if you would still consider me a given in your future but then I remember I am angry at you, you became that same absence I was so used to feeling. Angry because you had shed your skin, tearing up cities and doing better fuck you for doing better I would die for you to have peace of mind, you deserve the world you deserve every moment of peace, how did you do it, can you show me? I have never been this lonely and I have never so acutely understood that nobody owes me their company. I wish I was less understanding, I wish I could scream at people and never think about them again. Instead my dreams are haunted with souls I retorted; pacing the shadows shrouded in a misery I inflicted with a singular sharp sentence. Even now, I can’t hold my anger for long, because you are far away and busy and I have been ill for so long and at some point it must fade into background noise. Instead I go silent.