Tissues.

Sitting on the golden table near the front door. Scrunched and left around the coffee table in the living room. Floating around the floor of the garbage pale in the bathroom.

I don’t know what’s in them, I know they have become the enemy recently. No matter where they are, my eyes look to find them every day, every minute, every time I walk through the house.

I beg him not to leave on most days, especially during the day when it’s light out. That’s when I know there are people out. At night, he goes around ten or eleven. There’s less and less people now.

My hands are cracked from washing. The light red peaks through the skin like an indelible truth dying to get out.

When was the last time I breathed so deep.

When did I have to remind myself that my lungs exist, that here they are, they are mine.

How long will I have to check the function of each part of me.

How long does this last.

I can’t have any hindsight on this. I don’t diarize or capture memories as they are happening. It is impossible to simplify the complicated as you are living it. Trauma is never processed until it’s done, it’s lived through. Until it’s over.

I curl up into his arms after I orgasm and remember the summer we met. I tell him about the sun shining on his face when I came to meet him on the steps outside of his apartment, the way he sat. The way his arms fell across his legs. I laugh at the way he was so closed off, but how easy it was to laugh and to love and to let myself love him and think of nothing else.

I remember how easy it was to breathe the summer air. To breathe him in. To breathe in the love and the freedom.

I remind him of how I came to him, laughing, and pushed him back until he fell onto his hands. He had no choice but to embrace me.

I remember the bugs in the air, the sun as it set, the purple in the sky. I remember the smell of the city air. The breeze as it swept through what is now our street, together. I beg him not to leave, not unless he has to. I remember the stillness of the full trees.

But he has to. And my cough deepens, and the tissues pile up around the house, and my lungs shake with fire and need and want and my throat seeks release.

We’re all just waiting.