The night before you left, still January transcended the hotel curtain as you pressed up against the altar of my back and whispered About time you got to sleep, you brushed my hair beside my nightshirt and put your lips upon my neck, mistook my ceased toss and turning for paralysis as opposed to simple lack of motion,
you thought I didn’t hear the rasping cadence of your voice calling through the opaqueness the way a lighthouse guides a lowly ship to shore from out the rain, that I was numb to the heated puffs of air spawned from deep inside you, radiating out to thaw my frozen limbs, I could grasp the corners of this moment and fold them into a damp clay wedge, mold it into a sculpture left to dry beneath the Grecian sun, and let it proclaim to all of Athens the epitome of “us”, let the tourists marvel at what was and gawk from angles from which we were unable to see, I'd let them watch our statue crumble from within, where water seeped through cracks already present as it scatters to the four winds, and trace the wreckage as it washes upon some Shanghai shore or tumbles through the streets of Moscow in flaring ruins, perhaps then I will not lie awake in want of sleep.
