On the first day that I visited her she told me that a spring in her mattress had been making a noise.  As we laid there and moved around, the spring made a noise and I knew what she had meant.

When you left me I could not speak or breathe.

I was chained to a reservoir of doubt that I haven’t yet surfaced from. When I told you I loved you, you felt compelled to respond that you, too, still loved me; and perhaps you really still do.  The artificiality of that moment, though- the words did not carry the same weight, the sounds emanating from our lips were sounds from a scene we’d rehearsed in our unconscious minds, robbed of their old vibrancy by the resentment that plagues lovers who have loved past their time, of lovers who are clinging, and love rots when it becomes overrun with possession.

In our predicament, we could not afford artificially.

In your manner, I could see you were confused.  You were ahead of me-I was not yet confused, as I was soon to be when the variables of our predicament unfolded upon me as I shut the car door and left the driveway.  I looked behind me in the rearview to see if you were waving, as you once had months ago.

I stopped at the hamburger shop to write of you in my journal, to write the lie of you, to deceive myself as I’d deceived myself in all our happy suffering together, ever since the night we met when we spoke in between kisses of my upcoming graduation and how profoundly, profoundly difficult that was going to be.