sometimes you begin at the end, and you trace forward. Or you start in the middle and parse the beginnings and the endings. Or you are everywhere and nowhere at once and everything is immutable, and the symbolism are but symbols clashing all about your head, as cheap and as moving as a highschool band.

And sometimes you can't stop crying and it happens in the car and it happens in bars and it happens in restaurants while the object of love watches over you, a myriad of complexities playing over his face and the bus boy looks away. You cry like a goddamned girl because you are a goddamned girl. But good things are said, and though this is the end of a good thing it will have to be enough, so you go home and invite him in and make some tea and spend a long while not speaking, stealing glances of profiles and committing them to memory, and then you spend a long time entwined, and the clock strikes midnight and then two, well into the witching hour, still entwined, still bewitched, by the wonderment of his grasp, and the doubt that comes skittering across my skin, does he hold me only to assuage his guilt, am I being an idiot or an earth searing pragmatist. I rip my hand from his.

He said earlier that he wanted to see me (that is before he moves far up the coast and a little inland, in another state) before he goes and so I righteously speechified about empty calories.... but in the morning, up before the alarm, in the half light I told him that maybe I thought it was a little bit silly to deprive yourself of pleasure on principal, but no one ever said that I wasn't gladly a fool for love either.

And I guess that's ok, I am pretty sure that's ok, I guess it's ok. I know that I cannot bear the anger, and I cannot sustain blame, I internalize, extract the ire, set it aside, I cry a lot, that is until I am drained, and then I keep going, because I believe in love, I believe in love, in my love. Time will pass, and I will still love him, but it's not that it diminishes, it will just soften and remain innocuous on the sidelines, until the next time. And though I can pitch and keen, there will be a next time, it might be a decade from now, or it may be him again, it will come, and I will just as gladly and just as dumbly offer up my heart on a shiny, shiny platter, complete with parsley garnish. It will happen, eventually, just as sure as I sit here before this piece of machinery contemplating bolting to Switzerland.