The sun had just begun to come through the windows when the phone rang, and time slowed the way that dust hangs in his rays when the room is still enough for you to see it. I always loved watching those fragments of old stars, memories of explosions that float in the air like both a foreshadowing and an embrace as warm as autumn, saying,

“You’ll make it through. After your heart can no longer stomach the torture, or the way the pain always expands to a weight that collapses on itself when gravity betrays the attraction of youth for the undress of age, you’ll be able to breathe again.”

The thing is, there’s no bridge for bypassing crucifixion.

Down the hallway, every ringing scream beat the truth in, and the rotary dial shook on its axis like my pale blue dot spun out of control and exposed as no less broken than the same motes of hope that spoke from their silence like prophecy.

“Ma’am, are you sitting down?”

I thought about life and man and assembly and my ribcage and sleep and watched the spotlight move upward with the sun descending and all of the particles that we weren’t made of maddeningly understanding like they were right about the news, and taunting like anything could happen with the right set of lungs breathing into this room.

I sat in the quiet imagining you heard the same sound despite how loud your mind always was.

What ifs are deafening questions.

The sun had just begun to come through the windshield when my whole field of vision became a prism system, and in the flash as long as a life sentence before my eyes, I had hope that, maybe, you would come to remember me as fascinating as every star - once monochromatic as ours - whose death gave birth to memories as colorful as this spectrum. It shone as if to say,

“She’ll forgive you. After searching the night and every dust cloud in her telescope or the empty rooms in your home, and collapsing into your scent like the moments you’d come in late with the night’s chill still clinging to the leather jacket she used to latch onto like one day she might not be able to feel you beneath it, she’ll be able to love again.”

The thing is, there’s no bridge for bypassing crucifixion.

Down the hallway, the phone sang its pitch as loud as our collision, and the car flipped like a pale blue top spun beyond the reach of its sunbeam suspended in time, like if its relative then i’ve got enough to get this out:

“My love, are you sitting down?

No matter how small a spec we are – floating in some empty living room – you are still a world to me, and I will expect to see you at peace with the debris that I return to in your afternoons, like the glimmer of old stars – no matter how dead they are – knowing that each and every piece was once a prelude to our eternal somethings who already knew the news. Anything could happen with the right set of lungs breathing into this room.

What ifs are deafening questions.

She'll learn to love again.