DivaInWonderland

There is a particular kind of erasure that happens when someone who once chose you, deliberately, tenderly, in the quiet of three in the morning, looks through you like you are simply part of the room

The bass moves through the floor and into my chest and she is three feet away and she is a whole world I was cursed to live in and never touch again.

I am so full of her and she is so empty of me.

There are things I know about her that I was never supposed to keep. A street. A grandmother's hands. The particular geography of what makes her feel safe. She told me in the dark like a secret and I have carried it carefully for three hundred days like if I hold it gently enough she might come back for it.

And I have been holding it ever since.

The lights go blue. Then gold. Then something that has no name. She's laughing at something I didn't hear and I am standing in the wreckage of knowing someone completely, the specific devastation of being a person who remembers everything about someone who has decided to forget.

She asked me once, on a night that I have turned over in my hands so many times it's gone soft at the edges, if I thought she was pretty. Just like that. Bare and unarmored and real, the question sitting between us like something newly alive. And every word I had ever learned became immediately useless to me. Pretty. God. And I remember standing completely outside the word, like it was a house too small to hold her in. Pretty was never even a category she existed in for me. She was something that happened to a room. Something that made you forget what you walked in looking for.

The crowd moves and for one half-second her shoulder almost grazes mine and my entire body responds like a struck bell, reverberating, ringing, embarrassingly loud in my own skull, and then she drifts away. Naturally. Easily. The way you drift from something you've stopped thinking about.

That is the wound, I think. Not the loss itself but the ease of it. That I am standing here like a cathedral built in her honor, every corridor of me carved with her name, and she has simply, walked out. Left the doors open. Didn't look back to see what she'd made.

I would have burned the whole city of Prague down to stay in that apartment with her.

She turns slightly and I catch her profile in the shifting light and I think: I know what you sound like right before you cry. I know what you've never said out loud to anyone. I know the geography of your silences. I know you the way you only know someone who decided, once, that you were safe enough to be known by...

And she will not look at me.