It’ll come when it comes, you said about your art, and now you’re going. Not so much as some breadcrumbs sprinkled for me to trace your escape. And you were never one to have a drop of paint on your trousers. Not a trace.

In the days before your departure, we draw our lines in the sand, shifting selves, emptying shelves. Yours and mine. This and that, tit for tat. Pulling of teeth, spilling of seed. You snip a lock, I clip a knuckle. Some small relief in the fact that we didn’t split the cost a year ago of the wooden plank we found at a flea market, so I’m at least left with something complete to write and eat on. I hide the saw under my bed in case you insist otherwise.

In this era of insomnia, dream journal demoted to journal, where I compose this, the attempt to make sense. Your departure will make a writer of me yet.

Your images and my codes – my head, your hand – turned out to be two incompatible languages. We could not speak and see at the same time. Could not reach. Or for all our reach, could never meet.

I wave the white flag, shouting surrender! peace! And you, so used to my words-as-weapons, flinch at the abrasion of my raised voice. Not again, and you cringe.

The idea of white makes me nervous when I’m in need of red.

Both prone to violence in our own ways. Your Art Brut, in theory. My attraction to sad endings, in practice.

You tried once to convince me that Art Brut had nothing to do with the brutal I like to link it to. I would have none of that, the words worked. How else now to name the hole where love leaked out and lost all memory that it ever existed?

What is life if not the most beautiful tragedy, I liked to say. I secretly spilled my tears in baby jars labeled Sea, for you to uncap and sniff and think of the shore where you grew up. I was happy to remind you of home.

Be careful what you wish for.

We spend our lives searching for the way back home, and how to leave.

The last time I did dream, I met the woman of your recent infatuation, the one you couldn’t stop talking to despite the distracting thump of shoes. Black hair that glowed blue in the candlelight, multiple tongues to your kiss. I can’t go again.

I run in place in the endless night to keep up with my racing heart. The doctors detect a murmur, I ask them if they could ask it to speak up. I throw my twenty pairs of unused running shoes against the closed door behind which are the incomprehensible whispers of you cradling her voice on the phone. Some talk of colors I’ve never heard of.

You, of all people, were never going to hurt me. Inertia turns on such ambivalence: you were mud with your come when it comes, and now you’re ceaseless.

We draw our lines in the sand. And I insist on interspersing our ending with five one-line love stories, in italics.

One-line love story, One:
Cruel hiccup of Cupid, when on a whim, he turns passion into a sand-in-underwear sensation.

Perhaps it’s your island ancestry, but you don’t need any more beach. Perhaps I’ve become sand to you. A stinging sensation where there used to be soft, and need. The sea smell of my tears becomes as foul to you as piss.

Reality sets in, in retrospect. How my independence depends.

I copy a Marianne Moore poem, “Poet and Person,” on parchment, roll it in ribbon, leave it in your luggage. The poet’s panoply of crutches and wings. How did wings ever come to signify freedom?

What could be lonelier than the bird, or the fiction writer?

My fact over dinner: Scientists have located the specific Mexican villages where the North American Monarchs migrate to each winter. Multiple generations are born and die en route. No butterfly that begins the journey will ever make it even halfway.

In the beginning – granted we began too soon – we used to share a daily fact upon your arrival home, emptyhanded, from the studio, sometimes even less than emptyhanded, missing a few fingers, in fact, from the slipped attempt to slice something into art. In the beginning, before you gave up trying, I would rub some heat into the severed fingers and sew them back as we shared our facts. I spoke of the many winged things. You told me about that art and architecture building.

How much and how little there was to learn and teach. Our game grew out of favor.As did lovemaking.

Until now, in the too-late time.

Hornier here.

In the days before your departure, our shadow selves can’t stop overlaying each other. Sex in the shower stall, stairwell, buses, in the public unisex. Palindrome in and out and coming and going and coming.

Cold stars whose cores still burn, however secretly. The sobbing and the screaming, in separate rooms, silently.

The only idea of sky we have here is the word “Star” spray-painted on the brick wall facing our window, which I see for the first time when I switch seats and sit on your usual side of the wooden plank, dining alone on the last aphrodisiac. So it was there taunting you all along.

One line-love story, Two:
Your mango dream: market of insufficient fruit, then finally a potentially perfect one which you bought but never bit.

There is also a certain violence in not allowing yourself to get hurt.

You don’t believe in putting your dreams to canvas. Inspired instead, however rarely, by some woman just inches beyond you. I know she, this girl of the moment, office assistant no less, is just a passing means to see me new again, before I fell and let you in. She, the already burning bridge upon which you’ll leave.

Remember the minnows below?

The way you loved me, then I loved you. How we switched seats.

“Poet and Person,” which to me, sounds like the way the lover and the beloved, object and subject, the reader and the read, exchange roles halfway through their separate trajectories that only intersect for a second before continuing elsewhere in the other’s shoes. The way you, then I, crossed stars.

A year here in this would-be artists’ colony where I thought we’d read over shoulders and collaborate collections, my book with illustration and your painting with poems. Instead separate trajections. I face the brick wall out the window as your boxes grow taller near the emergency exit. I try to convince you the alarms will surely sound if you use that instead of the regular door. But we can’t find it. I consider using the saw to make a new one, but I don’t want to give you any ideas.

Remember how, in the heat, we used to spill out onto the fire escape, drop dried petals onto peoples’ plates in the café below?

Remember how we discovered along the riverbank that merely moving our arms above the water created a shadow that moved minnows? I used the word minnowshadowing in the book I was working on. You use me for the sake of a story, you said. Eventually I’ll be used up.

My memories dismember me. I was bigger then. Sponged as I was with the wine of your wooing, laddered on your idolatry.

A picture of me? I asked about these pencil lines you could no longer connect, in the other room, where it was cooler, you said, and quieter. My roots sunk into the silence. I couldn’t use my running shoes but I was jogging in place in socks, murmurings only the inner ear hears. You couldn’t replace but you could negate. I snuck into your space in your absence and discovered: the horror of blank sheets.

I completed that book, minnowshadowing scenes, something about Degas and dancing girls, as you by day tried instead to play breadwinner, a new suit and cube, and where was she sitting then in relation to you? By six when I was all itch with the need to speak and share, you were already emptied, expunged, and couldn’t ask me the questions I lived to answer.

Our game grew out of favor.

Boxes inside of boxes.

One-line love story, Three:
She hands him her brain a box labeled “Love me,” wondering would he, and would that matter, to which he replies, “Sorry we are not accepting submissions at this time.”

Degas Must Have Loved a Dancer, unpublished. About a male artist and a female writer – who else? – who opt not to experience their potentially perfect love in order that they might have more to create with paint and print. Not quite our story, but. I wanted to ask you do her portrait for the last page when she was finally ready to admit the words wouldn’t work. Too late.

The past I’m already nostalgic for overlays your face. Those eyes. The past I overlooked when I had it in the present tense, when I was worth winning.

When you tapped my breastbone with a paintbrush finger, When are you going to let me in?

Role reversal: I stretched the necks of all your tees, when I hung my weight from the fabric in order to make contact with an inch of skin underrunning. Dark thick hair like porcupine needles in our sheets. Yet pillow lips. At the $2 kissing booth, you once did me for free, and now I would give anything.

Eyes like lost children on your face. I can’t condemn you when I consider those eyes.

Respective deadlines. I was going to write a novel by year’s end. You had to make me love you. We both succeeded, our successes were both failures, respectively.

In the beginning, too soon, when on a whim I asked you to move into a home with one window facing a brick wall, when I was in charge of my heart, when you were temporary to me. A relationship leased, leashed to real estate. One year, option of renewal. Temporary to me.

One year later: don’t leave, even though I always knew you would have to. We have yet to try truffles.

No greater loneliness than this: you busy not-talking to me in the next room. Unwatered world, where my love tends to sink its roots into dry cracks and silence, sadder than any singularity could be.

One-line love story, Four:
The ear – she fears – is only an erogenous zone if it happens to be listening.

I love you in retrospect, in the too-late time. Or do I just love now the way you loved me then, and is there any difference? Surely our blindness is a factor of not being seen.

In the wooing room, in the then: you brought me lollipops and lilies, filled a sketchbook with my silhouette, made shadow birds on the walls. You sold your blood to pay for our first date. Smooth move until you passed out halfway through the movie.

I love a sad ending, I said before we left early.

We were going to name our baby Chase, not that we wanted one but it was my game to name. You would have supplied the paints and I the ink, infinite surfaces for him to run away on.

I imagined him halfway between your black marble eyes and my impossible limbs. Beautiful Baby Halfway. Baby Maybe.

I understand now why women think mixing sex liquids, egg and sperm, will make for some kind of compromise. Still, I’d do anything now to bleed.

Surrender! Peace!

Far harder than we would have ever anticipated to say goodbye. In the days before your departure, in the down time, we’ve only gotten as far into a wave as one-degree bend of elbow, hint of wrist.

One by one, we’ve sampled all the aphrodisiacs: champagne, oysters, strawberries, chocolates, oils, toys, porn, drugs, lingerie, role-play. Stay, we have yet to try truffles.

I’m afraid our words and whips only served to cripple each other.

Panoply of residence. My abundance of stuff left little space for lingering houseguests: my crutches and spare crutches, my wings.

I stop to admire the colored wings of dead things.

Remember our petals on the café plates?

Aerophobia, fear of flying. When this dream journal used to catalogue my sleep, when I used to sleep, I plummeted in any number of planes into the ocean. Are there no buoys?

You and your Shadenfreude, your Art Brut, such cruel terms. In theory, in periphery, since you use them only in beginnings and ends. It’ll come when it comes and now you’re ready.

Your fact: the university’s art and architecture building – of all things – was designed to make visitors as uncomfortable as possible. Rough walls that scratch arms in passing, ceilings so low they threaten to fall, precarious stairs too small to take one and a time, too big to take two. Treacherous and terrible.

The jar of tears I present in parting must seem as foul to you as piss. We used to prefer sex when I was bleeding. In the days of your departure, how to find a way to tell you I am overdue. Certainly not on purpose, I would never invent this. Of all times – in the too-late time – to be late.

I contemplate the many ways of the razor in the average American family: a father’s face, a mother’s legs, a child’s wrist.

Before you go, I spray your cologne on a handkerchief and ziplock it in the freezer. Wave the white flag, or save it for later.

Specimen of you.

Nabokov’s butterfly collection.

Pin your wings.

Panoply of residence, shared stories of our youth: That nail polish my parents used to apply to make me stop biting my nails and sucking my thumb, I developed a taste for it.

You were a latchkey kid, coming and going as you pleased, or watching too much TV. A body at rest tends to stay at rest, a body in motion starts packing.

Today’s journal entry: He cinches the clitoris with a wrench and cranks.

I have completed the Encyclopedia of Limits; you can’t begin to paint the sea until you find its center, the eye. Still searching.

Eyes like lost children.

Life is the most beautiful tragedy, isn’t it?

What’s an anagram for broken? Are there no buoys?

Is it possible you were moon and I was just tidal-pulled?

False alarm. In this last day of your departure, I finally get my period. The end of the sentence. The white flag turns red and I find strength and solace in my favorite color. A stop sign that signals some new starting.

Rilke: the sky exists only for clouds to form in.

You stack the boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes, boxes I lived to open.

I was hoping we’d break bindings together.

Bread.

Body of.

Given, and shed.

For you.

One-line love story, Five:
We didn’t know where we had been till the door marked Eden clicked closed behind us.

Goodbye.