In a windowless room yesterday, a nearly pristine green notebook opened for the first time in seven years.

Seven, or so, years ago, flat on my back on the floor, the motion of the earth and the morning sun and moon and the rotating planets and spinning stars and twirling galaxies – the entire fucking cosmos – had nothing on the room around me.

In the static, there was singing;

“what is a promise after all,
when there is another way?
would you watch me suffer,
coming, so slow, to dust?”

I couldn’t hear myself sobbing and my chest was caving in.

“tell me you have not forgotten,
it will never be okay.
this is as good as it ever gets;
you know what we say.”

A monstrous fire between temples, billowing smoke and saltsteam.

“how many more minutes
will you stay so far?
the terminus, baby;
a road to nowhere.”

Coughing and choking and blind, the wisdom of whirling walls and lyric of the late light washed the world away.

The morning prior – the morning she left – the apartment was a disaster. While she had rampaged through the rest of the place, I sat bleeding and listening against the wall in the locked and barricaded bedroom. Two sounds in particular stood out from the rest of the ransacking:

I. An odd, dull crack, immediately followed by the sound of her crying. She tried to stay quiet, but I heard.

II. A series of loud thuds, like four or five heavy things falling to the living room floor – just a second before she left the apartment for good.

When I was sure she was gone, I climbed up from the floor, moved the dresser away from the door, and went to inspect the damage.

The liquor cabinet was totaled. I’d guessed as much, though I hadn’t counted the bottles as they smashed, so I wasn’t sure whether anything might have been spared. The only one missing was her Plantation rum, I don’t remember which kind. The rest had been either broken or left upside down and topless in the kitchen sink. In the living room, the long-unopened bottle of Absolut had been used to bludgeon both the television screen and the Playstation 3. The latter held up better than the former, though it was soaked through with the liquid itself; presumably, the bottle had finally broken on the top of the console. For some reason, she never went back and finished it off after she got her hands on the baseball bat. Maybe drowning it in liquor was enough.

The stuffing of two throw pillows, along with their cases, was strewn about the broken electronics and fragments of glass from both the television and an end table. The living room furniture had all been turned inside out; one of the couch cushions had actually been cut open with a kitchen knife.

The source of the second sound was lying on the floor between the living and dining rooms. My best guess is that she started to take it with her when she left, but changed her mind just as she was walking out the door and threw it back into the apartment.

The barrel of the bat now had a large black scuff across the word “Slugger” and a slight indentation at the bottom of the S. It took me a while to process this. I think I may have stayed knelt beside it, staring at the scuff, for a solid couple of minutes. I felt dumb. And very stupid.

Once I got back to my feet, I finally noticed the bookcase. Its right wall had taken a half-hearted swing; checked, maybe, but too late. This would have been the dull cracking sound. The blow had left a crater in the wall of the fifth shelf from the bottom and a couple of small splinters on the floor, along with a few things which had been knocked from the shelf; your CMBR letter, the half dollar which had been tucked inside it, and your paintbrush. Aside from a few books and pictures which had fallen flat, everything else appeared undisturbed.

I placed your things back on the shelf and went to the kitchen, where it didn’t look so much like the scene of some gruesome crime. The bottles in the sink were all empty, save for the Jack, which wasn’t left totally vertical and so a shot or two had come to rest in one of its corners. I poured it down with the rest and tossed the empties into the trash can, then started a pot of coffee.

While it percolated, I made my way to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, taking a pale blue and a pale red from a green glass bottle she had given me as a gift, a couple of weeks prior. I placed them on the kitchen counter beside my mug and watched the pot turn black.

Long nights are hard to come by. Nevertheless one followed, and through the blackout bled:

there was nothing but someone
spinning around me
a cold murmur behind my ear
a whisper in a lost voice:

“frosted iris. merlot sclera.
inert hand-covered heart.
it is time to give up;
but something terrible
has happened to your watch”

the room rushed back with air to draw

“it is time to get up.”

gasping, once more breathing

“nothing at all, and what must be
lying-“

distant laughter inside my head

“-just between you and me.”

the fever in stitches
unraveling with the dream

“my deathshy tragician
what now, pale blue wonder?”

a wave. crash.

eyes awash and open
I said
“I’ll ask the questions here.”