I.
If it is any consolation, she, too, is lonely. She, too, hesitates to divert her gaze from the mindless, continuous stream of over-edited photos displayed on the screen of the phone in her hand—picture after picture of faces whose voices she no longer recognizes. She pauses before twitching her thumb, before tapping to text you a message. You do not have to pretend. Neither of you desires to pretend for a moment that your promises to keep in touch were valid—that you both should take seriously those words quickly uttered between the shifting of your bodies as you embraced one final time in the heat of August. The sweaty skin of your bare arms awkwardly stuck together in the humid air, and your bones beneath became rigid and unwilling to break away. Perhaps in that moment, even your physical bodies first succumbed to the separation of your souls.
II.
If it will, in any way, ease your anxiety over your inevitable encounter, please know that she will not arrange it. She will not invite you to wonder casually at the fleshy padding acquired mysteriously at her waist and thighs, while she simultaneously notices how your left front tooth has twisted after all, after thirty-six months of middle school you spent picking broccoli from your braces. At lunch time, she sat across from you anyway, smiled with you anyway—perhaps because you never once asked her why she tossed her peanut butter sandwiches in the trash. You never once questioned the faint violet petals growing out from the angled edges of her cheekbones, framing her hollowed eyes.
III.
She prefers to whisper your name, alone, and recall perfectly to memory your cadence of a quiet, stuttering voice. She would rather not face the reality that, in your “Public Speaking 102” class this semester, your voice has traded its timidity for rich, deep confidence. It has dissolved into yet another which she would not recognize. Indubitably, you yourself would tremble at how her bruises have faded indeed. They now have given way to rosy blush and soft dimples at the corners of her lips—lips, that she keeps pressed together tightly in a neutral line stretched across her face. Rainy three a.m.'s and stained red solo cups have warned her of the danger in smiling.
IV.
If your bedside prayer tonight is that she will not text you, remember how she once admitted her abhorrence of open-casket funerals. No matter how long you stare and analyze the corpse, you can never locate a solitary trace of the laughter that had once echoed in your ears or of the footsteps that had once swayed back and forth on the kitchen tile. Lying among faux rose petals and black-and-white photographs is only emptiness, the vacant encasing of what had once existed. Surely, you recall how she preferred the lid closed, how she believed it is easier to mourn the loss when you close your eyes to the emptiness—when you ignore the fact that anything is lost at all.
