Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person.

I sometimes wondered why I even answered the phone, but I guess I always had the hope that it would be someone else, some other way of life calling for me.

I found, increasingly, that I did not particularly care and I tried to fake a little kindness, a little sweetness, tried to mirror Luna back at herself, but that exhausted me after a week and I concluded that I was not meant for this sort of thing, friends, friendliness, no, I wasn't meant for it.

Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other's vicinity?

I wasn't sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was.

Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share.

He excused himself for a nap, and this day blended into his dreams like like years blended into a life, unseen but still felt, the line between memory and present always bleeding.

I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn't matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing—nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will.

I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a real feeling—a feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.

My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don't have anywhere else to put, and I knew that the mind and body are connected, and that my bodily sensations were just messages from my mind, but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all this mind and body stuff that I didn't know what else to do with.

I couldn't decide how to feel about what he was saying, whether it was all nonsense or just more evidence that I would never understand this world.

Sex seemed like a thing that might only happen to me at random, outside my control, like the weather.

But what had really happened? It was still unclear. Was it possible nothing of any significance had ever happened between us and our ending was just the sad process of realizing this?

It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn't in love, wasn't in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone.

She was sure no one had ever been more in love than they were in those weeks, consumed by such longing, wanting to just be alive beside each other.

But we always avoided talking about these things—difficult things—and I wondered if that meant we'd be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives.

It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.

And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.

Lately, I couldn't remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I'd only seen the previews to.

I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.

I had never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it—that she'd be better off not living—and how was I supposed to live after that?

That boy never seemed to smile and he wore long sleeves year-round, and I was not so different from him—we were both unable to get near the real life in life.

He would never be that way again. He would never have the power of that specific kind of not-knowing.

I couldn't blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself.

I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face—not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt.

I wondered for a moment if he was trying to get me to join a cult, but I realized it was just his youth talking, not a dogma.

I thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he'd like to become part of a story, any story.

Someone said once that they'd never heard of a crime they couldn't imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn't such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn't not like to see smeared with blood—one person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn't want to do that and I didn't know how to do that and I wasn't sure how I was going to do that—

Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.

I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.

Though I knew I had the potential to do this locked in me like a poisonous pet snake, I knew I didn't have the part of a person you must have to turn that potential kinetic, to be the kind of person who can let their awful plow.

Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all.

You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.

It depressed me to think that I might have been looking at another person but seeing only myself.

Maybe misery begins everywhere.

She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.