I don’t remember the last time I saw you before I left.

But I don’t think any of it matters –

I mean what’s a goodbye? When we share so many secrets.

Those living scenes that beat and breathe, those are the things I remember, and it’s there my allegiance to our past lies, they are what came last when I last saw you and they are what comes first when I think of you.

Back then when you had spoken, I held my lips at a single point and my voice died.

The rising, bubbling heat reduced to a simmer.

I had hoped to have had something to say, that the words would shoot out of me like bullets. What to say, what to think, how to console you,

how to console myself.

But instead, there was a vacuum between you and I. Between your words that I heard and the nothing I said, the vacuum existed in that hour to hour of the noon, and I want to reimagine that it was silent, but your eyes and your mind made noise, mine remained silent.

Can you imagine what it felt like? What it felt like when the words seem to fall away from you, in a terrifying sense maybe you could, but what about in an average sense? My potential for words has always been the same human mediocrity – a point on a graph, an axis, a simple standard. But to lack even tart empathy and the slick, oily flattery the kind that makes your tongue go thick.

 To think even those words had escaped me is likened to death in my mind, and I suddenly realise that I was also in danger, to acknowledging the steadiness of the cold gusts in my heart.

I sit back now and the gusts frolic and wrestle behind me, they no longer rattle my ribcage or injure my spine, and I know now that you didn’t need me to be more, to be a hero with words. You needed me to say something.

Did the nothing hurt more that the broken rulers edge? Was I a numbered slash a cut serialized and memorised, I remember thinking that they were scratches until I realised they were not superficial cuts, not empty marks pressed into the flesh but they were wounds of war and prison, a sacrificial mark – why were you giving yourself up?

Why was I leaving?