Blank Canvas

The Romans believed that a toothache signifies a departed soul,

someone who was once part of life but then slipped slowly out of it,

much the same way in which a page filled with watercolors

is slowly drained of hue when time is rewound.

The first man I ever met that could find all the hidden freckles

scattered around my tailbone was also the first lover

I ever had who was depressed. He majored in biology;

we spent countless days learning about the common fruit fly

and how its lifespan is only around 30 days or so.

Sometimes I’d find him smoking on our rooftop at 2 am,

naked, dangling his feet over the edge as close as he could handle.

When he was sad he never wanted to fuck, just held my hands

at my sides and buried his head in my neck,

said Depression already fucked me over once today.

I remember, once, holding him against the sink as he shook

like a 7.9 earthquake on the Richter scale, trying to take

the bottle of pills out of his hands, the two of us struggling

like marionettes until, finally, it flew out of his grasp,

and all the pills landed in the bathtub, drifting on the surface

of the water like pale, tiny ships.

He was gone two years later and sometimes I still

roll my tongue around in the back of my mouth,

trying to find the darkness where he once was,

like the way in which someone who’s just had a tooth pulled