i. 

In those times we were all dying for love. There was little else to do. Fewer people to meet, fewer places to go, and the moon only had four phases, without all that funny business in between. It is to say you could only do things halfway, all the way, or not at all. There was no almost and there was no maybe. It’s like this: somebody spilled their drink on you at the bar, and you looked at me and said: Avenge me! And now I’m consigned to an impossible mission for the rest of my life; an incomplete aspect after your heart. In those times I could’ve just killed the guy with the sword that I probably had. And then I could say: Oh, this old thing? Russet handlebar, family heirloom, forged in the side of a mountain by a young yellow-haired smith, the adopted son of metalworking trolls. I have pockets of stories just like this. Old songs, rusted in the narrow recesses of the once-legendary woods before we were made magic; before magic made us mean, blunt objects, confined to the hypothetical. I love you in theory. 

ii. 

You can’t love something from the inside. It can’t love you from there either. 

iii. 

This is so much empty space, he says to me, and gestures between us. I think what I’m in love with is the empty space. It’s what I’m looking through to get to you. It’s what I reach across. Without the space there I don’t know if I love you at all. This is how we ended up standing chest to chest on the dining room floor. He shook his head, hair bristling my ear. No, he says, that’s no good, now I’m looking at everything there is on the other side of you. Now I can’t see you at all. 

iv. 

Here’s the ticking, here’s the calm, the driftless area of your body, half its size swallowed in sheets. The bargain, the price, and the now-lonely vale you left behind. Pink and yellow, wide-eyed wide-mouthed evening. The dappled fawnskins and the endless everywhere. Foal-face and baby teeth, you cannot go back, not to where you came from. Now the grass rashes your feet.  

v. 

You’re all knuckles, even now. When you love somebody it’s like you’re hitting them in the face with it. 

vi. 

I was singing and you were telling jokes; you made me laugh mid-note and the laughter reverberated through my voice. I’ll never make that sound again. 

vii. 

I am trying to say something beautiful about you but all I can manage is something true.