I won’t ever hear the word “disaster” again without thinking of you. But not because you are one. But because you made me— Is it weird to miss your broken sentences, your incomplete thoughts? I pretended to know you through an absence of language instead of an over-exhausted familiarity with one. I liked the confusion. But you’re gone now so I find myself writing your incomplete sentences into my own mind. I gave you the last secret that I had left. You didn’t mind it—it wasn’t all bad. Now if anyone ever asks me for my secrets, I can tell them who has them. They don’t belong to me anymore. This is what happened without you around: I cried in the doorway before making it into my house. Then I cried on my mother’s front porch in the dark until the neighbor turned on all of her lights. I knew she was listening but I couldn’t forget your one uneven eyebrow. I couldn’t forget the sharpness of your elbows. How they bruised my thighs. This is what is happening with you not around: I want to say, I’m not alright, either, but I probably never was. I don’t wake up covered in sweat. I don’t forget where I am, where I have been. My lips are bruised from being inside of someone else’s mouth. I speak in full sentences. I think about syntax. I think about what I had wanted to forget. I know you’re reading this and it’s making you feel worse. I didn’t ask you to. We wanted to distract ourselves from ourselves with each other and you gave up first. I sleep next to poetry books every night. There with me, in my bed. It helps me to forget that you were there once, too. They write themselves to you: they are all sorry, every single word of them. I want that secret back but I won’t ask for it. I always knew I gave too much of myself away. This is what’s happening with you not around: I’m sorry that I idealized you into stone, into dust, into memory. I told you that I had a bad habit of that but you held my hand anyway. Make me videos of the inside of your brain when I climbed the rungs of your spine like a ladder. When I got lost inside of the space between your words, the space between your bedroom door and mine, the space between your teeth. Tell me you’re okay even though you don’t mean it. I’ll romanticize the rest. It’s what I do