It’s been two weeks. She’s not coming back. You’re not sure if that thought is going to pass quietly like a widow crossing herself silently in a church. Or if you’re going to wet your keyboard trying not to cry and failing pathetically.
It will never be the big things that hurt you the most. Always the tiny things. And you will always forget this.

You sit down to dinner and her song comes on. Your heart balls itself up into your fist each time the plane lands in the city where you met. And even though the skyline changes every year, you still remember the crack on the pavement where she broke her heel. You ask for the same table you spent your last morning with her. It still wobbles on the same gamy leg and that makes you happy in some inexplicable way. You pause on the street where you never kissed but should have. You walk into the mall and you smell her perfume. The fragrances section is right at the entrance. That way they can assault you with every feeling you’ve forgotten you possess. Beauty hits you in the nostrils. Intoxication slaps your cheek. Passion stops you in your tracks. Guilt, regret, and irrevocability break your will. You’re ambushed by memory, by association, and on its heels, by the reminder that it all exists in some ambivalent place in the past.

Still, how can you not allow yourself the lurching memory of the way the air heats up sweet the closer your nose gets to her neck? One follows the next. Before you realise it, you’re under. You’re drowning. She’s everywhere and she doesn’t want you.

Underneath your skin, behind your flesh, you can almost hear the sound of breaking.