I counted
I counted as I sat stopped on the floor. I counted backwards through the things I was letting go of. They were changing. When they are still I feel that they have already been left in my wake. The apartment was still, the tables and the roads had stopped and the lights weighed them down. I wasnt letting go. Nothing is gone, things just happen at different times. There couldnt be a sound. Not in the way this fooled everything into one place. These thoughts were organizational and absent. They put life into a trajectory. I felt partly mechanical and the rest air. Night is not a medium. Sounds stop before they reach me. From underneath, the passing waves effortlessly emit silent thunder. Throats dont need voices and there isnt anything to say. If I had anything to share it was that everything was exactly the same for me as it was for her. Some situations put us to those slender graces of power apart from each other, when we pretended to make settings for our bodies that the other might find. I thought, early on, that what I left for her would hold, merely because I had taken the opportunity that surplus provides, to forget. From that point everything was moving away from every other thing, alone. She and I moved at the same rate. If I could stop she could fall into me, replace me, she could surpass me. I thought that things would stop and stay, that marks in the sand would coexist with place settings at a table or a turned down bed, or a note folded in her pocket with the rest, I thought it would stop everything without comment, without breeze or other hands, until the absence of any other context beyond those that I had littered let them untethered in oblivion. There would be something where I am. I gave myself the crown of the final force and I left her where I was. Without the sound of warning, or the wretch of movement and friction, the rebus of my days slipped out of place, was buffed away, turned slightly, or withered in the light, as I had been tossed by the dunes as they collapsed under my weight or bled inside when I exchanged tissue for air. It was slight. I kicked lightly across the tile and set my feet ankle on ankle proud of the ajar door. As I passed things by, so was I. I couldnt expect that the consequences of my actions meeting the entropy of the rest of the days would precisely accept her in my place. But I would know if they didnt. Ciphers like us only mail rent checks, we dont find ourselves in letters, with names, proliferating. We disappeared before we realized we had the choice. We leave vague stains.
I ended the moment she passed out of my vision, and the apartment fell away with her in it. There isnt a need for both of us. Things spread out their emptiness this way. The choice to allow her anything was no longer even mine. She towed my wake of secrets. I no longer know what they were. I left nothing to be the shadows of sand onto sand. I left her the space around my body. The sun doesnt touch the earth at dawn. It passes by it. It doesnt ever throw its rays into this bathroom. It doesnt even move forward now. It is filled with dry sand as the water rises. All of the water and all of the sand cloud together but havent moved. Nothing moves. It is dry and clear. It leaves only former states of its character, descending arid breaths. Its movements are habitual, they come in predictable stations. It is a cloud that would be silt, but the water has gone. It doesnt last. Things disappear within the midst of greater things, threads from wide sheets, buttonholes on dresses, digits in geographic locations, a banister from a stair, the peak of a mountain, tongues, and where dust clots the real things that are growing old quickly. It is not approaching dawn. It wont be. It is covered with the driest sweats. The tile floor is dust, the tile walls and the towels are dust. It is overcome with air where it had been held together. The air is not a breath. It is a hot wind, and the dust is blown and it swirls in bunnies through the sky and a dry foamy rain falls, and goes on falling.
