You kept asking how I could stretch myself across those pages with so many words stuck in the back of my throat; sprawling and ink-stained and silent. It has been two years and the answer still isn’t fully formed - I suppose there’s something to be said for the way turning experience into an expression negates the requirement of an authentic account. But maybe it is an authentic account if it’s mine. I’m not good at this.

There’s an ache so total it engulfs, encompasses. It is Tuesday morning and something’s missing.

I have tried tracing your outline with what’s left of my humility, but there are better parallels I can draw - a rotting corpse pacing the bordello. Comatose. 

I’m good at this; I have built an entire life in the subtext because misery has a tendency to grow mundane, people tend to be more interested in the downfall if it precedes a success story. Or a tragedy. We are more invested in the narrative than the tangible, we are more susceptible to adrenaline rushes than empathy. Still, I wouldn’t have minded being a concept to you.

How to make this sound beautiful. My lungs are filled with bruises; don’t you see there are so many different ways to say I can’t quite catch my breath? So many different ways that I can find a prettier word for pain, deflect these notions with metonyms. Don’t omit the gory details, dress them up in belletristics - make the sting seem salient.