Short Short #1 You are an extinguished star in a sky I don't care to look up at again. You blink in the darkness of my bedroom, waiting with pursed lips and your head sinking, letting your hair too thick with the day's sweat to fall over your face. I am sitting on the edge of bed my so that my toes are touching the carpet. We are conversing in a language made up of awkward silences, of dramatic breaths, and the beginnings of sentences bubbling up to our lips just to whither away in the frigid conditioned air. What do you say to someone who you used to love? Do I say I know the circumference of your neck and the way the smooth flesh under your hair line feels against my fingers? Do I say that I have found the hollow of your neck with my forehead more times than I have found my own bed? Do I tell you that I sleep with my blanket curled into a knot next to my chest as though some shadow of your presence is there to lie with me? How quickly these familiar objects become foreign with you gone. It's like breaking a thought, pausing these second nature affections, scoping out the distance between us. I have known you from the wrinkle of your crooked nose down to the way you curl your toes when you're nervous. How did we become so unfamiliar? You sit down beside me, hesitant, body turned toward the door. And we kiss, our tongues #lifelines in each others throats trying to rescue a shared #life that has long since drowned in the resounding bitterness of our end. My lips are numb. I do not feel you in the base of me as I have. Your lips scratch, and for the first time in notice that you role your tongue within me. How quickly we become strangers. I try to speak, to parse out these spaces into something tangible. Every word is leaden and heavy out in the air. I am throwing syllables at this abstract idea of want. My throat is dry. My brain swells. My stomach churns. You get up, folding into yourself. I apologize when my love makes you uncomfortable, and like always you say it's okay. That it was nice. You leave, and I sit on my bed. I gain a little more of myself every time you're leave. I breathe a little better with you gone.