Blue turns to purple. This might be better.

You rest your head on my chest. I cover your exposed ear. I want you to hear it thumping.

I’m trying to catalog the places where fat, bone, and muscle are warring, where one of them wins out. This is the most solid you've ever felt— the most present. I’m not my hands. I can’t feel myself beneath you. I’m not sure when things changed. How long since my body got cold? Where did that heat go?

I feel my age in the familiarity of motions, the changing of condition. My hand follows the same course down your back. I’ve started to vomit more. I don’t have to think of how to turn my head to bring our faces together. I bruise easily. You sit up on top of me. I know how to tense my jaw to stop myself from quaking. But this dizziness is new.

My form collapses. Your body falls through mine. You’re alone on top of the blankets.

I've started to think of myself as light.

.·゜゜·　　·゜゜·．

The door to the bedroom is locked.
I begin by pulling the cards out of every hidden spot: bags, behind dressers, boxes under the bed, picture frames and piggy banks. I lay them out across the floor like a new set of tiles. This is the foundation. The record of everyone who has ever contained me in words. I’m taking the steps. I reorder them chronologically. I start with my parents, the notes they wrote for me when she was pregnant. Then come the birthday cards. Cartoon heroes and blocky letters. The letters from my grandparents and godparents, with rosary beads rolling at the bottom of the envelopes. Cartoon valentines, middle school notes. The first solemn apology I ever received. Graduation cards with deposited checks, sympathy cards from when one died, then the next. Christmas cards of friends newly married, standing in front of trees wrapped in string lights. They look older than I want to be. The last are the letters I wrote for myself. Words digging into paper. Tears opening up at the end of sentences.

It makes me feel ugly.

I stack all the yellowed envelopes in a box to be burned. Delicate. I move through the spaces between them on my toes and coat the cards in a paint of deep purple, thin, careful, so that nothing bleeds through, and then I fold them back to flat with a bone. One at a time I place them in new envelopes, dazzlingly white, and seal them with my spit. In white ink, I write: RETURN TO SENDER.

I leave the room and I’m beaming.
I’m ready now, it’s coming, and I want you to see this. 

But I’m only talking to an empty room.

.·゜゜·　　·゜゜·．

I want you to know this: I once was visited by a deep sadness. He sat; we shared a drink.
Our hands rested on the table in front of us, uneasy. Our fingers nearly touched. How can one conceivably cry for help? I asked him. He chewed the inside of his cheek, thought, then said: when I walk through my collection of unfamiliar homes, I’m scared I’ll turn the corner and see myself standing there. Grab me by the loose skin of my neck, find the gun in the safe, pull me to the yard and make daybreak.
He looked so pitiable. I hated it. I asked for a memory.
He offered one named Grief.
I no longer had time for that: Tell me something happy.
He said: I was born of flashing lights above new-fallen snow. I took shape in the breaths between flashes, in chimney smoke that darkened clouds, in the static interruptions of a car radio. Impermanence made me into something constant.

Wrap yourself in light, I said, every inch. As a way of eradication.
It’s impossible. Particles will diffuse at the gaps between beings. I will be born again.

Then let there be no gaps. I took his hands, turned them over and uncurled his fingers. How can you hold something in your hands and say: this is not my body?

I let him come home with me that night. We filled each other’s mouths with words. In the end, I had to ask him to leave, to find a way out of this body we’d built together. He said that wasn’t my choice.

.·゜゜·　　·゜゜·．

I’m not going home tonight. Found a cat on the corner of the street where a boy with my name used to live and we sat. It was curled in a ball hidden deep beneath a bush that was patchy and grey and untrimmed. The light of its fur shone between the branches. Hairs shook out and floated to the ground as it crawled toward me. I held out my hand; it sniffed my finger then licked it. A small abrasion. The cat went on walking, leaving shards of light behind it with every step and I followed.

It led me to that spot, beneath the tree transposed into a streetside bed, where you buried the detached head of a bluebird in our first year of school. It had slammed right into an obstacle it couldn’t see. Just as I had.

You left the head in the dirt to let the soft parts around it fall apart until the skull came out clean. You wanted something to come back for. I used to sit here on nights when I couldn’t be left alone. Hoping you’d come out of the doors and find me there. November, April, July. The wait was always too cold.

I’m ten blocks from home and my phone is off. The wind is loud and I didn’t bring a jacket. My fingers are white and purple beneath my nails. I feel slow and I’m shivering in a way that makes my shadow look beautiful.

Under sweat and a streetlight I turn over the whole bed of dirt. No skull. You’ve come back. You’ve taken it and maybe more. Or maybe it just dissolved. Became by your hand nothing, or just nothing that would want to be held up against the light and what it once was.

The cat jumps to its feet and I follow it down to the memory at the river’s edge. Cars are scattered across the parking lot, filled with light and smoke. The river at the base of the stairs is gentle and overlapping. A thin frost forms on the guardrail and the cat perches.

Then.

The wind and the river were too loud to talk over, too loud for my sighs to reach yours, loud enough that I could pretend that you were sighing for attention too. We gripped the rail and leaned hard against the metal. I wanted to fall. I wanted the concrete to crack, I wanted us to slide into the river and break apart against the stones.

We didn’t look at each other. Not because we didn’t want to, but because we couldn’t. Too much impulse. Too much expectation. Or maybe there wasn’t. Maybe we just liked how gross we felt. How thin.

I pulled myself over the guard rail and dangled my feet off the edge, so close to the water. I wanted you to sit with me. I wanted you to stay behind. To leave. I wanted to lose myself to the cold, every muscle and tendon contracting, pulling me inward and closed. Mainly, I wanted you to have to choose: whether you’d carry me on your back, or leave me there folding in on myself.

None of it happened. We took the long way back, pretending it was still too loud to talk. Now.

There’s a shadow at the edge of the bridge. I close my eyes with my palms. A splash. My vision splits between my fingers. The shadow is gone. So is the cat, the rail, the steps. I’m waist-deep in the water, losing reflection.

I wash myself, cupping my hands and passing over every inch of my body. I can feel myself stinging in the raw air, expanding. And then it’s purple for real. Everything else starts to leave me. It’ll be purple and then nothing and then what?

I’m lifting myself out of this moment. White blankets the ground and breaks up the sky. I leave dark footprints as I walk. Light starts to stick to me.

The city breaks around me and pulls itself into a line. The corner. The mailbox. The school. Home. The wind is blowing hard; tendrils of white crawl up the windows and walls. It’s up to my ankles and everything grows.

I think I’m being followed. I can feel breath hot on my neck. The buildings start to thin. My eyelashes are heavy and cold. Breath gathers around me. I think I can see us beyond the haze. We’re sitting at a table with our hands overlapping. The room is hot and lined in neon. Our glasses are forming rings on the table. Something that’ll last.

There’s a faceless man behind the bar passing time with a dishrag. He looks at us, and then he looks out through the window. He’s looking at me. Though faceless, I can feel his eyes. They’re not on me. They’re in me.

He checks his watch, then comes around the bar to our table. The neon is calling. His hand is on my shoulder. I can feel it outside, too— pulling.

I want you to know that you’re smiling. Our faces are red and wide in a way that matters. You bring your face close to mine. Our mouths are to each other’s ears. I hear the whisper. The voice is young and bright. It says, “I’m not going to exist anymore. Not in the way we knew.”

A door opens. With a tug on my shoulder, I turn. It’s all white now. So white it’s dark. I can’t see anything beneath me, but I know I’m standing at the edge. The city, where I’ve been, unfolds far below and becomes formless.

The string is in my hands. I pull it tight around the limbs, the chest, the neck, the face. The points press in. Small warmth pushing in. Breath softens the ice on my eyelashes, and then I close them. They join together and do not reopen. Everything starts to blink. You always said my hands were cold, so I wrapped myself in light.

I’m a slice in the sky bleeding purple against white. It is glimmering; vacuous. Possibility; expectation. There is so much and nothing to be. It’s collapsing and lovely.

Approach. I’ve found myself hidden in the void of my body. It’s the brightest pain in the world. It is a supernova, red to blue to purple and mercurial, pulling itself in and apart before it explodes. Every atom is alive, destroyed and reborn; I become blind. Nerves can’t process it. To be removed and replaced, anew and the same. It feels like being touched all over. This energy is final to itself. It cannot conduct energy. It is the start and end of stagnancy. It is a pain so wonderful that everyone I’ve ever touched must feel it too.

It ends as soon as it begins. A new body remembers what silence feels like. The hands tingle and everything expands. Purple turns to nothing and shines. Things can only begin.

.·゜゜·　　·゜゜·．

There’s a hum in the morning. Fans. Cars. Breath. Light. What is next to, beneath, above, within. There’s a taste in his mouth that belongs to something older. He washes it away under coffee and early porchlight.

New snow covers the ground and is in the process of parting. Sunlight softens things. Water drips from ledges and becomes ice where it falls. Large sections break and slide off of slanted roofs. It sounds like footsteps in the sky.

When he reaches the dregs in the bottom of the mug, he turns back into his apartment and washes away the brown rings with soap. He places the mug upside down on the drying mat. The cat leaps onto the counter and presses its head against his shoulder. Unhurried, he pats down the cat’s back, up again, and around its ears. It purrs under his hands.

“Just one second,” he says, softly.

When he pours out the cat food, he measures it precisely. The cat picks up a few pieces of kibble between its teeth, then looks up at him as it chews. In its glassy eyes, his reflection seems close and accessible.

There’s a letter on the table. The envelope is clean and bright. On the flat side, the handwriting is neat and loops around itself. He opens it: dragging his finger along the seam, folding back the triangle, and pulling out an unfolded card. His friends smile up at him on glossy paper. It makes him smile too.

When he rests the card on top of his windowsill, he gives his friend a call. They pick up after five rings. They make small talk. It’s comfortable and unimposing. As they speak, he notices a spider on the floor. With a piece of paper, folded cleanly once and then twice, he urges the spider out onto the porch. He watches. It works its way slowly up the wall and starts to spin. They wish each other a happy holiday before they end the call.

He walks. The snow is thick and heavy. He puts himself through the struggle earnestly. Wind aches through his lungs. It’s a wonderful reminder of being.

The streets are quiet above the snow. Even the plows seem to honor the silence. People go by, leaving imprints behind them; he smiles as he passes. The city spreads out around him in all directions, in its own order, and his path is but a fragment. Inconclusive. He can see behind his eyelids. The buildings exist in more dimensions now.

There’s a restaurant squeezed between brick walls on the other side of the street. He leans against a streetlight while he waits for the signal to cross. It’s wrapped tightly in pure white lights and green wires. He rubs around his wrist with two fingers.

In the restaurant, there’s no server there other than the bartender. The tables in the back still have chairs stacked on top of them. While he preps for the night, the bartender keeps his eyes on a small TV in the corner of the room. A game is playing. The sound is small and makes the room feel quieter than silence.

The man eats slowly and plenty. With his finger, he traces two rings in the wood, the shape of half moons. They sit opposite each other, warmth between. Finished with his food, he orders a coffee and watches the TV. Once the first cup is gone, he orders a second to go, tips well, and leaves while the game is still playing.

He rests his arms over the rail at the edge of the bridge and drinks. Rocks break through the surface of the water below. It parts and disperses, rises and falls, then rejoins itself again. The movement is neither slow nor hurried. A thin haze crosses the surface of the river and rises, widening into an invisible thickness.

At the edge of the river, far below, a staircase leads down to a stone platform separated from the water by a thin metal railing. A few more steps lead down to rocks and the current. The water sprays, turning the snow dark and thin.

A figure stands on the platform, leaning against the railing. Their breath is heavy and settles in front of their face without rising. The man cannot see the eyes, the mouth, the way their hair curls around their ear. Only that they are.

He lifts his cup into the air and nods. The figure waves back. They both turn to walk.

Don’t you see? I’ve elected to live again.