Breadcrumb #32
ANNA PICAGLI
To start at the climax seems appropriate here. Our stomachs are swollen with breakfast and we are lost in a forest somewhere in Mamaroneck, the bleached crown of your hair safe against the crook of my shoulder blade. Silence took us, and the first sun of summer, and the skywriters in their frivolous grace. What a stillness there, in that fresh grass, pressed against the blade of all things, I as your bed frame and you as mine, just mine, for a stunning, stolen moment.
There aren't words for the way you left. I woke up sweating for months, reaching for your long-gone hair, the warm and missing weight of your body against mine in sleep. A year has passed and still, nothing has eclipsed you. This neatness infuriates me, this stability: worthless without feeling. I have come untethered from the earth, I swear it. What a stunning production it all was, though. What a horrific accident.
Do you remember the first night? You in your bound breasts, your painted beard, your propositions? You girlfriend and her good hips and the loud cluck of her tongue? The push and pull and mess of the three of us. And the rest of the lovers. Your roommates. Your brother. The whole world, watching the bomb of us tick. I have never felt such untrammeled motion. If the revolution was ever on its way it started in your living room the night Kevin inked matching freckles to the insides of our hips. Remember the hollow needles and how this was all your idea? That was the first time you ever reached for my hand. Your fingers were thin and coffee colored and I fell in love with you instantly. I can still feel your unbroken grip on my square palm.
“I can still feel your unbroken grip on my square palm.”
I can still feel you leaving: the slow melancholy pull, the horror, the departure. Me left to sleep in the bed we laid in, a mausoleum of memory. Remember the eclipse and the pots clinking on the stove and me, up to my elbows in your dishwater, and you, with your hands on my hips?
The whole of the stunning thing we were leaning toward?
I still have the bent nail I pulled from your doorframe. Nothing else, though. Nothing else.