‘This poem is the poem I am writing because we aren’t speaking, and it is making my heart hurt so bad, it is all I can do just to get up off the floor sometimes.’
– Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

Of course he was lying. Of course, he missed her. “Her presence was confounding as it was exhausting. But her absence meant a different world altogether -” The disquiet of quiet. A quiet worse than the worst, most stubborn  silences which stole a smile. I do not understand.

“Look at these motionless clothes, lay your face upon her icy pillows. I can’t bear to. Can you? How can you bear it?”I look. I see a bed that betrays no passion. Linen uncreased, in mourning.

An ordinary pair of rubber flip flops now made romantic, an air of disenchantment about them: “They once lay at her feet, where I once lay.” But surely, it is foolishness to be talking of things. They are only things. They are not her.

“But they are her things and so I tell you all this.” I say nothing.

“To have her no longer sleep beside me is enough to set into motion the breaking of my heart. Now I must try to understand all over again.”

Of course he was lying. You never understand these things.